History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage 9781400834051

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HISTORY LESSONS

HISTORY LESSONS The Creation of American Jewish Heritage B E T H

S.

P R I N C E T O N

W E N G E R

U N I V E R S I T Y

P R E S S

Princeton

and Oxford

Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire 0x20 ITW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wenger, Beth S., 1963— History lessons: the creation of American Jewish heritage / Beth S. Wenger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-14752-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jews—United States—History. 2. Jews—Cultural assimilation—United States. 3. Jews—United States—Identity. 4. United States—Ethnic relations. 5. Salomon, Haym, 1740—1785. I. Title. E184.35.W418 2010 973.04924—dc22 2009049446 .

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British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Jenson Pro Light Printed on acid-free paper °° Printed in the United States of America 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my sisters, Judy Wenger and Debbie Wiatrak

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION

IX

Xi

1

CHAPTER ONE

In Search of American Jewish Heritage 15 CHAPTER TWO

Civic Performances: Jews and American National Holidays 58 CHAPTER THREE

War Stories: Jewish Patriotism on Parade 96 CHAPTER FOUR

Historical Tales: Educating American Jewish Children 135 CHAPTER FIVE

Sculpting an American Jewish Hero: The Myths and Monuments of Haym Salomon 179 EPILOGUE

American Jewish Heritage after World War II 210 NOTES

231

INDEX

265

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure i

Cecilia Razovsky, What Every Emigrant Should Know,

Figure 2

Pushcart vendors on New York's Lower East Side, 1930 34 Men working in a clothing factory, circa 1900 36 Der groyser kundes (The Big Stick), July 16,1909 65 Thanksgiving pageant at New York's Educational Alliance, early 1900s 70 An American Passover celebration, American Hebrew, April 19,1889 85 The Wanderer Finds Liberty in America, 1919 8g The Jew in America's Wars, The Jewish Veteran, August 1935 113 Monument to Jewish Civil War veterans, Salem Fields Cemetery, Cypress Hills, New York 123 Jacob Cousins memorial, Portland, Maine 124 Memorial Day parade outside New York's Park Avenue Synagogue, May 1934 126 Service conducted in New York's Park Avenue Synagogue before the Memorial Day parade, May 1934 127 Funeral service for Daniel Harris, February 12,1945 129 Cover of The Jewish Veteran, April 1934 131 Advertisement for the Jewish War Veterans automobile reflector, The Jewish Veteran, July 1935 132 Advertisement for "JayVee" Blades, The Jewish Veteran, July 1935 132

1922

Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12

Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15 Figure 16

2&

ix

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 17 Figure 18 Figure 19 Figure 20 Figure 21 Figure 22 Figure 23 Figure 24 Figure 25 Figure 26 Figure 27 Figure 28 Figure 29 Figure 30

Students standing outside a Lower East Side Talmud Torah, 1934 i}9 Sholem Aleichem school, Chicago, Illinois, undated 141 Photograph of the Hebrew School graduating class, Hebrew Educational Society of Brooklyn, 1927 151 Workmen's Circle School, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1935

172

1928

192

1979

207

Portrait of Haym Salomon, artist unknown 182 Model of proposed Haym Salomon monument, 1925 igo Model of proposed Haym Salomon monument, Great Triumvirate of Patriots monument, Chicago, Illinois igg Haym Salomon monument, Los Angeles, California 202 Haym Salomon U.S. postage stamp, 1975 206 Cover of Shirley Milgrim's Haym Salomon: Liberty's Son, Dedication ceremony, Official State Historical Marker in honor of Haym Salomon, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1997 208

Fiftieth Anniversary Program, George Washington Letter Reading Ceremony, Newport, Rhode Island,

1998

226

Program of the 2008 George Washington Letter Reading Ceremony in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 227

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the years that I have worked on this project, I have benefited from the support and good counsel of many friends and colleagues as well as the assistance of several institutions and their staffs. It is truly a pleasure to have the opportunity to acknowledge those who made this book possible. A fellowship from Yale University's Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion in 2000-2001 allowed me the time to mine the archives and cultivate the seeds that ultimately made this project grow. I am grateful to Jon Butler and Skip Stout, the Institute's directors, for creating a nurturing environment for scholarship. A grant from the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation also provided support that helped me move forward in the early stages of research. I am particularly indebted to the American Council of Learned Societies for a fellowship in 2006-7 that enabled me to focus solely on writing. In the 2008-9 academic year, a Mellon Research Grant from the University of Pennsylvania's Humanities Forum made possible some much-needed relief from teaching, so that I had the time to complete the manuscript. Finally, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation graciously provided a subvention to Princeton University Press that helped to defray the cost of illustrations. This book would never have been completed without the capable assistance of knowledgeable archivists and librarians. Lyn Slome, former director of the library and archives at the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), answered my many questions, and her familiarity with the collections led me to an array of helpful sources. Tammy Kiter, who recently became the photo archivist at the AJHS, has provided timely assistance and identified useful images. I thank Jesse Aaron Cohen for lending his expertise and guiding me through the xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

YIVO Institute's image collections. As always, Kevin Proffitt, Senior Archivist for Research and Collections at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, along with Camille Servizzi, graciously responded to my research questions and image requests at every turn. Pamela Elbe at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History generously gave of her time when I conducted research in Washington, D.C., and offered permission for image reproduction from the Jewish War Veterans collection housed at the AJHS. At Penn's Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, librarian Judith Leifer found a way to track down even the most obscure book or journal. Seth Jerchower, former librarian and archivist at the Katz Center, graciously scanned several images that appear in this book, as did Christine Walsh, Administrative Coordinator of Penn's Jewish Studies Program. Claire Pingel of the National Museum of American Jewish History helpfully supplied material from the museum's collections, and the volunteer staff of the Touro Synagogue Foundation gave of their time to provide materials that I requested. Many students and colleagues played a role in this book's creation. While they were undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, Corey Brooks and Eve Mayer conducted research that contributed valuably to this project. I feel extremely fortunate to have met Jordan Schuster, then completing a Master's Degree at Columbia University, who provided critical research assistance during a crucial moment in this book's development. His sharp analytic and translation skills have made this a better book. I owe a particular debt to David Lobenstine for his careful reading of the manuscript and thoughtful suggestions for improvement. His attention to detail and focus on the book's broader themes, along with his constant encouragement, made it possible for me to complete this project. So many friends and colleagues contributed in a variety of ways to the production of this book. Conversations with Hasia Diner, Aryeh Goren, Rebecca Kobrin, Pamela Nadell, Gail Reimer, and Jeffrey Shandler provided a sounding board for ideas and always left me with fresh perspectives. Richard Beeman, Benjamin Nathans, and Michael Zuckerman—all colleagues of mine at the University of Pennsylvania—generously answered specific questions and offered valuable suggestions. xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Karla Goldman, Paula Hyman, Arthur Kiron, Deborah Dash Moore, Kathy Peiss, Riv-Ellen Prell, David Ruderman, and Jonathan Sarna each took time out of their busy schedules to read individual chapters. I have benefited enormously from their comments, suggestions, and feedback. I hope they know just how much I appreciate their personal support and professional expertise. I am particularly grateful to Karla Goldman, Deborah Moore, and Riv-Ellen Prell, whose unflagging belief in this project, and my ability to complete it, propped me up on more than a few occasions. I also owe a debt to those colleagues who edited some preliminary essays that eventually became part of this book. Some of my first explorations of the Haym Salomon myth came in a volume edited by Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen, Divergent Centers: Shaping Jewish Cultures in Israel and America (Yale University Press, 2OOi).JackWertheimer encouraged me to think about war commemoration in American Jewish culture during a conference that he organized and in his subsequent anthology, Imagining the American Jewish Community (University of New England Press, 2007). As editor of The Columbia History ofJews and Judaism in America (Columbia University Press, 2008), Marc Lee Raphael sharpened my perspective on Jewish celebrations of American national holidays. Finally, Deborah Moore invited me to deliver the David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs at the University of Michigan in 2008. The published version of that lecture, which was greatly improved by her critical comments, ultimately became part of this book's first chapter. I am exceedingly grateful to the editors and staff of Princeton University Press. Brigitta van Rheinberg, now editor in chief and executive editor at the press, showed interest in this project when I had only just begun my research. In the years since, she has been extraordinarily patient, and I thank her for retaining belief in this book. Clara Platter shepherded the manuscript through the final stages, and I simply could not have asked for a more responsive, encouraging, and thoughtful editor. I also extend special thanks to Vicky Wilson-Schwartz, who copyedited the manuscript with exceptional care and skill. I am confident that working with Princeton has markedly improved this book. I also appreciate the efforts of Tobiah Waldron, who prepared the book's index and Carol Ehrlich, who helped in proofreading. xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the course of this project, and on so many other occasions, I have relied on a close circle of friends that has endured for years. Carolyn Braun, Terri Jacobson, Marcy Leach, Karen Smith, and, once again, Ilene Blaut rarely discussed the details of the book with me, but their ongoing support and willingness to listen with caring and humor as I vented my frustrations has carried me through the most difficult times. Through the years that I have worked on this book, my family has tolerated the twists and turns of the project with remarkable patience. My parents, Nanette and Julius Wenger, supported my efforts without question and endured the particularly difficult challenges that accompanied this work. While they may not have appreciated the details of the process, my sisters, Judy Wenger and Debbie Wiatrak, have unfailingly encouraged my work and put up with its vicissitudes. I particularly want to thank my sister Judy and brother-in-law Marty Beaird, not only for the many dinners they provided during my New York research trips, but more importantly, for listening to the saga of this book for too many years. From a greater distance, I also very much appreciate the ongoing support and interest from my brother-in-law Brian Wiatrak. During most of the time that I worked on this project, Abigail and Molly Beaird, along with Kevin, Jesse, Katie, and Juliet Wiatrak, knew only that their aunt wrote books, and that has turned out to be more than enough.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

E

ach year I teach a course in American Jewish history, and almost without fail, at some point during the semester, the class discussion takes a familiar detour. We might be discussing the mass migration of Jews to the United States or perhaps the various political expressions of American Jews, and invariably, a hand goes up. "Judaism teaches democracy," a student says, in an attempt to explain historical developments ranging from immigrant acculturation to social activism to labor organizing. Heads nod. More often than not, I am the sole detractor, pointing out that Judaism and democracy have never been synonymous, except, as this book will argue, in the narratives created by American Jews. Nevertheless, the students who populate my classes, particularly those who have grown up in Jewish households, hold fast to their convictions. As the debate continues, I press the issue further: "What about Judaism is inherently democratic?" One student replies with assurance, "The Bible teaches democratic values." Another student, a religious studies major, disagrees: "The Bible is a theocracy and has nothing to do with democracy." As the discussion unfolds, it becomes abundantly clear that while some students believe that the Bible itself teaches democratic values, others have broadened the discussion, arguing that both American and Jewish culture share a core set of beliefs. The class debate continues, with students supporting both sides of the argument, but many, especially the Jewish students, clinging furiously to the belief that democracy lay, in one way or another, at the heart ofJewish values. As the conversation develops, the issues at stake begin to extend far beyond a highly selective reading of the Bible. Students were using the Bible, the essential text of Judaism, to make a claim about the nature of American Jewish identity. By insisting that Jewish and American cultures converged seamlessly, these college

INTRODUCTION

students were asserting—perhaps without appreciating the bold nature of their claim—that Jews belonged in the United States, that they were unequivocally and organically part of the country's social and cultural fabric. Most of these students had no idea that they were repeating, almost verbatim, the dictums about American Jewish culture that had been consciously constructed by previous generations of American Jews. During the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, American Jews from all sorts of backgrounds grappled with what life in the United States would mean for Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture. Although unanimous conclusions never emerged and sharp disagreements indeed took place, the majority of American Jews found ways to stitch together their two cultures, even if they could not always hide the seams. Despite occasional uncertainties about what might lie ahead in their adopted homeland, American Jews participated in an array of public events and produced and consumed a vast corpus of popular literature that championed the possibilities for Jewish life in the United States. In speeches, newspapers, textbooks, public celebrations, and institutional proclamations, Jews regularly asserted the compatibility, similarity, shared values, and parallel trajectories of Jewish and American cultures. As I listened to my students faithfully articulate almost the same notions and participated in many similar discussions while delivering public lectures, I began to realize just how firmly these axioms about American Jewish culture had become entrenched in popular consciousness. Over the years, the repeated and eager declarations of my students, who are the latest in the long line of Americans to create narratives about their pasts, sparked my interest in exploring the formation and perpetuation of American Jewish heritage and examining the creation of popular notions about American Jewish history and culture. The invention of these narratives both eased Jewish adjustment to American life and created a distinct ethnic history compatible with American ideals. The regularity with which American Jews continue to articulate the convergence and compatibility of Jewish and American ideals reveals just how thoroughly this maxim has penetrated American Jewish culture. Indeed, in American Jewish history, no theme resounds as loudly or as consistently as the perceived symbiosis between Judaism and

INTRODUCTION

American democracy. Yet, as one scholar has noted, "the synthesis of Judaism and Americanism is a historicalfiction."1There is nothing inherent in either American culture or Jewish tradition to render them fundamentally compatible. Rather, it was American Jews themselves who created this construction of American Jewish culture and gradually cemented it in books, communal celebrations, and a variety of public proclamations. In a creative process of collective self-fashioning, Jews reinterpreted their own culture and history to fit the circumstances of American Jewish life. In so doing, they laid the foundation for an American Jewish heritage that fused the Jewish past with the American future and shaped the paradigms of Jewish religious and ethnic culture in the United States. Anyone with a passing knowledge of American Jewish history, or of immigrant history for that matter, will recognize in the narratives of American Jews the familiar refrains of minority groups of all stripes declaring their belonging in America through the rhetoric of compatibility. The cultural landscape of America became defined, in part, by the enormous number of immigrant and minority groups proclaiming the similarity, even syncretism, between their traditions and values and the American ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy. Yet, the pervasiveness of such rhetoric should not suggest that the recasting of immigrant identity in American terms was an automatic or unconscious process or that all immigrant groups engaged in that process in the same way. Even within the Jewish community, different political and social groups articulated distinct ideas about why Jews and Jewish culture could so easily find a place in American society, though almost all agreed on the fundamental principle. Jews proclaimed faith in America confidently and repeatedly, often as much in hope as with certitude. It may have been a construction, but the invented harmony between Judaism and Americanism persisted for generations and emerged as an enduring axiom of American Jewish culture. This book explores the construction of a Jewish collective past in the United States from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. These years represented a formative period within American Jewish life, beginning at a time when immigrants from Central Europe began to build a flourishing Jewish community and lasting through the arrival and communal maturation of the wave of migrants from

INTRODUCTION

Eastern Europe. Along the way, this study examines the myriad ways that American Jews simultaneously narrated their own history in the United States and wove themselves into the narratives of the nation. The "history lessons" chronicled in this book were not the work of professional historians but rather emerged gradually in both formal and informal settings. American Jews found seemingly endless means to create a useful sense of the past, both in print and in public. Visions of American Jewish history found life in the planning and production of Jewish public celebrations and in the sermons and speeches delivered by rabbis and communal leaders. Countless Jewish families passed on a sense of ethnic and religious history to their children around dinner tables, and many Jewish students acquired an understanding of their shared past through formal Jewish schooling that complemented the American education they received in public schoolrooms across the country. Similarly, the past was plumbed for meaning in the abundant and active Jewish press, in newspapers andjournals of every ideological persuasion, as well as in the pages of popular histories and children's literature. The result is an abundance of narratives, a term that I use broadly to encompass the various retellings of the American Jewish past, whether written or spoken, that posited an understanding of the development of Jewish life in America. As they celebrated American civic holidays and commemorated Jewish service in America's wars, as they highlighted Judaism's contributions to democracy and their own communal contributions to the culture, American Jews affirmed that they belonged as citizens in their adopted homeland. But these occasions were more than advertisements ofJewish loyalty and a chance to champion Jewish contributions to the nation (though they certainly were intended for these purposes as well). These articulations of the past also provided an opportunity for Jews to trace the path of Jewish history and interpret the meaning of America within it. Popular retellings helped to craft a script that lent Jews a central place in the nation's history while also making sense of America in the context of Jewish history. That script was codified in popular American Jewish history texts and particularly in the literature written for Jewish children that transmitted these "lessons" to future generations. Although the American Jews chronicled in this book devoted substantial effort to crafting the history of their people in the United

INTRODUCTION

States, this does not mean that they created histories in the traditional, academic sense of the term. Instead, what they produced was not history but heritage. This broader, and far more encompassing, term highlights the ways that American Jews designed their Jewish past as an expression of their own interests and expectations for Jewish life in the United States. Heritage, a term first used to refer to the succession of property among individuals and families, had become by the twentieth century a notion that defined collective identity among ethnic, religious, and national groups. Through heritage, David Lowenthal explains, "we tell ourselves who we are, where we came from, and to what we belong."2 Jews, like other Americans, had just begun to use the term "heritage" during the period covered in this book. The idea of collective heritage became increasingly common in the 1930s, alongside burgeoning attempts at historic preservation and an interest in transmitting a sense of shared history to rising generations. It then came into widespread usage in the decades following World War II, as efforts to popularize national history multiplied.3 The eager reception of American Heritage magazine, for example, which began publication in 1954 and has remained a widely read magazine for decades, constitutes just one illustration of the growing cultural currency of the notion of heritage.4 Although the subjects of this book may not have always invoked the term, because it had not yet become quite so fully ingrained in popular parlance, American Jews indeed actively engaged in the process of creating a shared heritage from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. The creation of American Jewish heritage involved much more than excavating historical memory. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has argued, "heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed," but rather represents "a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past." As American Jews selectively culled from their history and invented a sense of their collective past, they fashioned a heritage designed to bolster Jewish identity and ensure group survival. Decades before the explosion of the heritage "industry" and the ethnic revival of the late twentieth century, American Jews had already begun piecing together popular renditions of their past in ways that could be transmitted to future generations.5

INTRODUCTION

By its very nature, heritage is always a partisan effort. Expressions of American Jewish heritage regularly idealized the Jewish past and aggrandized Jewish service to the nation, as Lowenthal cogently puts it, in order "to generate and protect group interests."6 This is not to say that American Jews intentionally falsified facts in their textbooks or misled audiences in their public celebrations. To the contrary, like other groups in the United States, American Jews searched relentlessly for the threads within existing historical narratives that emphasized their belonging in America, their contributions to the nation, and their right to maintain distinct religious and cultural traditions. The history they told could be self-congratulatory, often embellished, and sometimes a blend of fact andfiction,but it also contributed vitally to the formation of American Jewish culture. Elements of pride, along with a few strands of falsehood or exaggeration, combined with historical truth in the creation of heritage. This curious mixture makes American Jewish narratives all the more fascinating and offers further proof of Jews' eagerness to carve a place for themselves in America. Historian Michael Kammen has observed that societies "reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them." Furthermore,“they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind—manipulating the past in order to mold the present."7 American Jews engaged in precisely this creative process as they crafted their heritage in the United States. It is not my purpose in this book to attempt to disentangle history from heritage. Although I will indicate when and how Jewish narratives take license with the historical record, I am more concerned with exploring the paradigms created by American Jews than with demonstrating the relative truths of their claims. Moreover, I do not regard history and heritage as distinct, diametrically opposed categories. David Lowenthal argues that the two enterprises possess radically different traits and sharply divergent motivations, insisting that"[h]istory explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time; heritage clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes." This stark delineation not only ignores the ways that professional history, too, reflects and grows out of present-day concerns but also fails to consider the more complex content of and impulses behind popular heritage, particularly in the case of America's minority groups. In the late nineteenth century through the

INTRODUCTION

first half of the twentieth, ethnic and religious minorities seldom found their experiences reflected in formal histories of the United States. These groups cobbled together their own histories from amateur accounts and the few professional works available, selectively choosing material from both. The narratives they created may indeed have constituted a "mythic past crafted for some present cause that suppresse[d] history's impartial complexity," but such "manipulations" do not invalidate their significance. Quite the opposite, the pervasiveness of historical creations, found across all ethnic groups, speaks to the necessity for each community to find a history that acknowledges its presence in the American nation and assigns it a meaning absent from mainstream historical accounts.8 The creation of a shared, usable Jewish past on American soil has been largely ignored by both American Jewish historians and scholars of Jewish memory, who often consider the United States a country too young to have built a Jewish collective past beyond the memories of Europe and the legacies of migration.9 The subject of Jewish memory and historical consciousness has received considerable treatment by scholars of European Jewry and by Zionist historians, but the heritage and sense of history created by Jews in the United States remains largely unexamined.10 Yosef Yerushalmi's seminal work Zakhor, a pathbreaking treatment of the relationship between Jewish history and collective memory, discusses American Jewish culture onlyfleetingly;in a brief reference to the shared Jewish past of the characters in Philip Roth'sfiction,Yerushalmi dismisses it as "only as meager as the span of a generation or two," and "trivial" when compared to the more weighty historical dilemmas that preoccupied European Jews.11 American Jews indeed possessed a significantly shorter past in their adopted homeland than did their co-religionists in most other countries, but Jews in the United States nonetheless created a shared history that helped to lend meaning to their experience in a new nation. This study relies upon the considerable scholarship on collective memory and historical consciousness and will contend that both developed within American Jewish society and played crucial roles in the formation of American Jewish heritage. Since the publication of Maurice Halbwachs's pioneering study of collective memory, scholars have been inspired to explore how societies and groups create and transmit a sense of their own origins and development. This has led to a flourishing

INTRODUCTION

literature examining monuments, commemorations, memorials, holiday celebrations, and a variety of other popular expressions that both reflect and convey group histories and identities, allowing them to be passed from one generation to another. According to Halbwachs and the French scholar Pierre Nora, collective memory operates as an organic and unconscious process that stands in opposition to the critical discourse of history.12 Newer scholarship, however, has resisted this dichotomy and suggested a more fluid relationship between collective memory and historical writing. Given that historians are products of the societies in which they live, popular conceptions about the past and group identity inevitably shape their approaches.13 At the same time, "[c]ollective memory continuously negotiates between available historical records and current political and social agendas."14 Thus, collective memory influences the writing of history, and likewise, historical narratives make their way into shared memory. Historian Amos Funkenstein argued precisely this point in his critique of Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor. Yerushalmi maintains that since ancient times Jewish collective memory was primarily liturgical, comprised of rituals, hymns, and prayers that evoked "not the historicity of the past, but its eternal contemporaneity." But in the nineteenth century, the emergence of critical Jewish scholarship gave rise to historical assessments of the Jewish condition that precipitated "the ever-growing decay of Jewish group memory."15 Offering a useful corrective, Funkenstein argues that historical consciousness (a“mediating category" that he distinguishes from historiography proper) always existed within Jewish culture. Long before the modern period, he contends, historical consciousness permeated Jewish society, and, moreover, even after the rise of critical Jewish historical writing in the nineteenth century, "historical consciousness and collective memory were never alien to each other."16 This was certainly the case within American Jewish culture, and even within this comparatively young Jewish society, historical claims merged frequently with enduring collective ideas about the Jewish past. Never monolithic and often hotly contested, Jewish heritage in the United States reflected the diversity of the American Jewish community. Jews frequently disagreed about which facets of both Jewish and American culture deserved to be highlighted and celebrated. The pages of the many different Jewish newspapers alone reveal the varying

INTRODUCTION

interpretations and meanings that Jews assigned to their experience in America. This book aims to capture a range ofJewish voices and movements, pointing to divergent readings of American Jewish culture. Focusing on the period from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War, with a few salient examples taken from earlier and later years, the book covers the era when the foundations of American Jewish heritage took shape. When this study begins, Jews who had arrived from Central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century were actively building the key organizations and institutions of American Jewish life and when it concludes, East European immigrants and their children had become firmly established and had added new dimensions to American Jewish culture. These years witnessed the sharpest political and ideological differences within the Jewish community and resulted in widely disparate outlooks on both American and Jewish culture. When the era drew to a close, the differences had become far less pronounced. Although complete consensus has never prevailed in American Jewish life, by the middle of the twentieth century, the central components of American Jewish heritage had largely been codified. This book takes the popular presentation of group heritage seriously. While the history told may have been self-serving and may often have exercised considerable license in its retellings, it nonetheless lent meaning to Jewish experience in the United States. The creation of these narratives helped Jews weave themselves into the fabric of American life. At the same time, celebrating Jewish accomplishments fostered group cohesion, affirming the legitimacy of ethnic and religious distinctiveness in the United States. In fact, these dual agendas emerged consistently within American Jewish expressions, one stressing the seamlessness of Jewish belonging in the United States, and the other providing a rapidly acculturating population with a rationale to retain allegiance to Jewish identity. Divergent readings of both American and Jewish culture remained a part of the heritage Jews created, even as some basic areas of consensus emerged. Most American Jews did not—and do not—derive their understanding of American Jewish experience primarily from scholarly works, and this was particularly the case in the approximately sixtyyear period covered in this book, when professional treatments of American Jewish history hardly existed. American Jews fashioned a sense of

INTRODUCTION

their history on their own terms, and they did so in the public arena— during communal celebrations, within their organizations, and in the pages of popular histories and the Jewish press. The invention of a distinct American Jewish heritage, complete with historical legends, heroic figures, and narratives of Jewish patriotism and cultural contributions, must be understood as a crucial element in the acculturation process and a key component in the formation of American Jewish identity. American Jewish heritage emerged gradually and from a variety of sources, as American Jews stitched together a collective past in the interests of ensuring a viable ethnic future. American Jews believed wholeheartedly that their adopted homeland had given rise to a unique chapter in Jewish history. Chapter i examines the political and social conditions in the United States that helped to foster that belief. By exploring American Jewish experience in comparative perspective and considering the ways that the frameworks for Jewish life in the United States differed from what Jews had known in Europe, this chapter focuses on how the American setting shaped Jewish heritage. While I do not argue that American Jewish life was entirely exceptional, there is little doubt that the United States provided an environment for Jews that differed significantly from Jewish experience in most European countries. America not only offered Jews citizenship without any prolonged debate over emancipation (as did England, Holland, and other nations), but also lacked a medieval past and a legacy of Jewish persecution. America’s emphasis on individual rights and the guarantee of separation between church and state afforded Jews an unprecedented sense of security. Although they certainly harbored occasional doubts about the promises of America, the overwhelming majority of Jews came to believe that the nation had indeed ushered in a new epoch in Jewish history. While Jewish historians continue to debate whether the United States truly represented a departure from all previous Jewish experience, American Jews heartily championed the notion at every turn, as they measured America against their European past. American Jews often described their immigration to the United States as transformative and claimed that the American environment allowed individual Jews and Jewish culture toflourishin ways that had been impossible in Europe. The mantra that "America is different" emerged as perhaps the most fundamental axiom of American Jewish life. 10

INTRODUCTION

In addition to examining the American Jewish experience in comparative perspective, the opening chapter also considers the prevailing myths of American Jewish culture, particularly the notion that the Hebrew Bible inspired America's political system. The Puritansfirstput forward the vision of a New Israel, endowed with providential blessings, to be built on colonial shores. Although that conception of America emerged initially among devout Protestants, it quickly became a defining paradigm of American culture. This chapter explores the eager Jewish embrace of America's claim to a biblical legacy, as American Jews used the notion of a new Zion to insert themselves as central players in the nation's origins. Through the biblical idiom, Jews established their formative connection to America's democratic tradition. Time after time, American Jews insisted that "the Hebrew Commonwealth was held up as a model, and its history as a guide for the American people in their mighty struggle for the blessings of civil and religious liberty."17 This formula played on America's central myths and used them to substantiate the claim that the nation's ideals had their origins in Jewish teachings, setting in motion an enduring assertion of Judeo-American symbiosis that survives to this day. The book's initial chapter lays the groundwork for this study by establishing the two prevailing assumptions that shaped American Jewish culture, namely, the distinction between American and European Jewish experiences and the parallels and convergences between Jewish and American ideals. Chapter 2 examines Jewish celebrations of American national holidays. Jewish communities throughout the United States regularly celebrated civic holidays such as Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July within the context of synagogues and Jewish organizations. Like other American ethnic groups, Jews used patriotic displays both to demonstrate loyalty to the nation and to articulate a sense of ethnic pride. Jewish celebrations of national holidays repeated a standard litany of Jewish devotion to the country that became a canon of American Jewish history, establishing a collection of heroes and defining an idealized version of the Jewish past. In these narratives, Jews portrayed themselves as model American citizens, often as the true and most vigilant keepers of the democratic ideal. American Jews marked public holidays in their schools, synagogues, and communal organizations and offered commentary in the pages of the Jewish press, lending Jewish meaning to the festivals

INTRODUCTION

even while joining with other Americans in civic celebrations. As much as holiday celebrations served to underscore Jewish patriotism, which certainly remained a paramount and ongoing purpose, they proved to be more than cloying moments for Jewish self-congratulation. Rather, civic occasions offered the opportunity for American Jews to imagine the nation they desired, to criticize aspects of American culture, and to claim ownership of national ideals. The book's second chapter looks closely at Jewish celebrations of American holidays, uncovering the narratives that Jews created about their own culture and the visions they put forward for America. The third chapter focuses on efforts to memorialize Jewish soldiers and commemorate Jewish war service. The desire to create a record of Jewish military contributions emerged from several different sources. To be sure, attacks on Jewish loyalty and accusations that Jews lacked a willingness to serve their country precipitated many attempts to document Jewish participation in American wars. But while defensive tones permeated the various chronicles of Jewish war service, particularly the statistical projects conducted by Jewish organizations during the two world wars, documenting military contributions also served an internal purpose. American Jews marshaled the record of their military service not only to prove devotion to their adopted homeland but also to underscore how much they had overcome their European Jewish past. Discussions of Jewish participation in America's wars regularly reflected back toward Europe, noting the ways that Jews, especially Jewish men, had been reborn as brave, loyal patriots in the American environment. Accounts ofJewish military contributions emphasized the transformative power of American freedom, supporting the notion that the United States had fundamentally altered Jewish behavior and experience. Moreover, by detailing their service to the nation, Jews crafted a story about their belonging in America, one that started with the Revolution. As Jews traced their roots to the nation's founding, they rendered themselves authentic Americans from the moment the country was created. Celebrating participation in America's wars and memorializing Jewish war dead also provided occasions for ethnic gatherings and opportunities to reinforce the message that Jews had always been loyal Americans. Some of the earliest public monuments built by American Jews honored Jewish sacrifices in war, as Jews joined other minority groups 12

INTRODUCTION

in creating tangible markers of their devotion to the country. Documenting war service, therefore, constituted another means for Jews to articulate their ethnic heritage, to set themselves apart from their European past, and to narrate their own history on American soil. Chapter 4 examines Jewish children's literature, particularly the textbooks and stories produced for use in Jewish supplementary schools. Created by adults to impart lessons about the Jewish past and to teach the values of American Jewish life, children's literature provides a useful tool for exploring different versions of Jewish heritage and changes in emphasis over time. These texts contain some of the most ideologically potent interpretations of American Jewish history and culture. Particularly during the interwar years, socialists, Yiddishists, and Zionists joined the various religious denominations in publishing literature for children and sponsoring schools that offered dramatically different readings of American Jewish experience. The various versions of the Jewish past and the political and social messages delivered to children shed light on areas of both consensus and disagreement among American Jews. This chapter also explores the creation of a litany of heroic figures in American Jewish history whose legacies were shaped andfixedin the pages of Jewish children's texts. By elevating and often embellishing the lives of historical figures and highlighting their deeds and personality traits, Jewish children's books codified key narratives of American Jewish history. Jewish educators found individual stories particularly conducive to spark the interest of their young readers and used tales about leading Jewish figures as object lessons in Jewish contributions to American life. Because of the didactic nature of Jewish children's literature, the portrayals of American Jewish experience put forward in its pages are particularly revealing. In the books produced for children, Jewish educators identified and crystallized the most basic lessons about the American Jewish experience, lessons that they hoped would instill pride and inspire the next generation to remain committed to Jewish life. The final chapter of this book chronicles the evolution of a single Jewish historical figure, the Revolutionary hero Haym Salomon. Focusing on the many efforts to honor Salomon and the sometimes contentious battles over his legacy, this chapter serves as a case study in the formation of American Jewish heritage and the many avenues used to create it. A successful financial broker who secured vital loans that 13

INTRODUCTION

supported the troops during the Revolutionary War, Haym Salomon later garnered the title "financier of the Revolution." Salomon's legend began to emerge after his death, when he left his family penniless, supposedly as a result of his personal purchases of government debt and his refusal to accept remuneration for his services. In the nineteenth century, his descendants unsuccessfully lobbied Congress to obtain belated compensation and thus kept the myth alive in public consciousness. Over the course of more than a century, American Jews came to celebrate Salomon as a patriot whose sacrifices for his country were never repaid. As Salomon's legend grew, he became a fixture in popular works of American Jewish history and children's literature. By the midtwentieth century, a controversial project to erect a monument of Haym Salomon exposed both the reverence for Salomon and the exaggerated terms of his legend. The chapter follows various efforts in several cities to build monuments honoring Salomon, some successful and others not. The enduring myth of Haym Salomon, the many different mediums in which he was memorialized, and the communal debates that surrounded his legacy point to the power of his image in American Jewish history. The desire to own and control the legend of Haym Salomon constitutes a potent example of the importance that Jews assigned to shaping their heritage in America. The creation of a people's heritage emerges slowly; meaning accrues over time, reinforced by the repeated rehearsal of key myths and the constant recounting of pivotal historical moments. Therefore, many of the same stories and themes appear throughout the book, as Jews articulated narratives about their history and culture in different settings and across many decades. Jewish contributions to the nation's founding emerged as perhaps the most pervasive theme. Time after time, American Jews repeated tales about the biblical foundations of the country, the Jewish role in Columbus's voyage, and Jewish participation in the Revolution. Within these retellings, Jews compared themselves to the Puritans and the Pilgrims, rendering themselves pioneers and founding participants in American society. These sorts of narratives were recounted during celebrations of national holidays, in commemorations of war service, and throughout Jewish children's books. In fact, it was the continuous reiteration of the central myths of American Jewish culture that gradually created a lasting heritage. 14

CHAPTER ONE

IN SEARCH OF AMERICAN JEWISH HERITAGE

A

merican Jewish history has been fashioned virtually from whole cloth. To be sure, Jews brought a variety of experiences with them when they arrived in the United States, having lived as Jews in all sorts of political, economic, social, and cultural settings. Yet, regardless of their varied paths to these shores, Jews settled in a society devoid of a lengthy Jewish past. Free from both the legacy of medieval expulsions and any protracted struggle over Jewish emancipation, the young American nation shared very few of the key hallmarks that characterized much of European Jewish experience. Unlike most other societies where Jews had lived, the government of the United States exhibited little interest in monitoring Jewish affairs, leaving Jews free to construct Jewish culture and community on their own terms. In contrast to the strong, centralized Jewish communities of Europe, whose power was often bolstered by ruling authorities, the only Jewish community that ever took root in America was entirely voluntary, a reflection of the needs and desires of those who invented it. The result was the creation of a Jewish culture characterized by an unprecedented degree of diversity, creativity, and innovation. Just as the United States defined itself as a nation of possibility, so too did American Jews envision multiple options for living as Jews in a free society. Successive waves of Jewish immigrants gradually built the foundations of a new kind of Jewish community in America, taking full advantage of the unparalleled freedom to craft their own religious and ethnic culture as they saw fit. 15

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As they went about constructing this new model of Jewish community, American Jews also encountered the unique challenge of building a Jewish culture on a blank slate. The United States afforded them unprecedented autonomy and options, but it was also a nation that lacked any coherent Jewish historical narrative. America was tabula rasa in terms of Jewish history, an outpost far removed from centers of Jewish culture and scholarship, a country where Jews had no past. Far from the authority of established traditions, America fostered a multitude of Jewish narratives. Individual Jewish immigrants brought with them their understanding of Jewish experience, which varied according to their own backgrounds, and non-Jews also carried with them a range of beliefs and attitudes about Jews. Indeed, people of all stripes who arrived in America across the centuries transported significant cultural baggage, including a sense of their own group histories as well as received notions about other peoples, races, and religions. In the United States, virtually every ethnic and national group required a new historical narrative, one that made room for their unique traditions and experiences within America’s larger story. In order to make America home— or more accurately, in the process of making America home—new arrivals needed to derive meanings about their adopted country and weave them together with their sense of personal and collective history. For Jews, who almost always stood apart from the majority culture in their previous homes, crafting a new historical narrative often meant asserting that Jewish life in America would be different from all that had gone before, that the United States would open a new chapter in the long history of their people. In their own writings and public proclamations, Jews often insisted that the freedoms of American life presented an unprecedented opportunity to transform the fundamental nature of Jewish experience. Despite these grand declarations, we should acknowledge that for most Jews arriving in America, crafting a new history hardly constituted a foremost concern. From the colonial period, when Jews represented a tiny minority of new settlers in afledglingcountry, to the mass migration of millions of East European Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, most Jewish immigrants were preoccupied with the overwhelming challenge of establishing livelihoods and communities in a new country, not with writing formal history. Even Jewish historians 16

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demonstrated an almost complete lack of interest in documenting the activities of Jews in the United States. Most formal accounts of Jewish history barely took note of the American Jewish community. As late as the 1890s, the American experience was often inserted only as an addendum to the first Jewish histories published in the United States, which focused almost exclusively on the grand sweep of Jewish history in Europe and the Orient. On the cusp of the twentieth century, even as the country stood poised to become a major Jewish population center,“the concept of American Jewish history barely existed even among American Jews, let alone world Jewry."1 The first sustained attempt to gather and disseminate the history of American Jews came in 1892 with the creation of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). Established at a time when ethnic historical societies were being founded across the country and when Americans were becoming increasingly preoccupied with chronicling their own history, the AJHS reflected an attempt by a group of Jewish elites to champion the pivotal role of Jews in American history and to rebut defamatory claims about American Jews. Like other ethnic associations of the era, the AJHS sponsored historical studies that cast its own people in the best possible light. Nevertheless, the organization's desire to document and defend American Jews—and to place them squarely within the central narratives of American history—represented the formalization of a nascent historical consciousness, an awareness gradually but profoundly taking shape among Jews in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 At a time when no professional field of American Jewish history existed, most treatments of the American Jewish experience were amateurish.3 Assertions about Jewish life in the United States flowed freely back and forth between the few historical texts that existed and the public square. For example, one of the first initiatives of the newly founded American Jewish Historical Society was to sponsor an historical study of the role of Jews in Christopher Columbus's voyage, and as we shall see, the findings of that study made their way into scores of popular books, sermons, and speeches in subsequent decades.4 Likewise, the books written for American Jewish children, examined at length in chapter 4, made liberal use of historical evidence. Their authors gleaned material from historical texts, borrowing selected information with 17

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considerable license. The editor's introduction to one 1930s Jewish children's book explained that, "the author found it necessary here and there to vary the details of an historical event for the sake of dramatic effect."5 This did not represent an attempt to manipulate the historical record; on the contrary, these authors took their role as transmitters of historical knowledge quite seriously and were determined to endow children with a sense of shared history. The attempt to derive collective meaning from American Jewish experience evolved organically as generations of Jews acculturated and adjusted to life in the United States. The shared history of American Jews emerged in piecemeal fashion, less a unified whole than a patchwork of individual and communal encounters with America, and less a coherent statement of purpose than a wide array of hopes for what their new nation might offer. Through fledgling historical societies, from the pulpit, and within emerging Jewish organizations, but just as importantly, through individual reflection and talks around the dinner table, American Jews sought meaning for their experiences in a country both baffling and enchanting. American Jews gradually manufactured a collective Jewish history in the United States, one that was endlessly repeated and refined, debated and promoted, on holidays and on special occasions, in times of war, during national celebrations and moments of group reflection. In the process of rehearsing their history and articulating their expectations, American Jews ultimately produced definitions of what the United States meant for Jews as well as what Jews meant to the United States. Through the conglomeration of narratives that they created, Jews wrote America into Jewish history and Jews into American history. No single narrative of American Jewish experience ever took hold; the retellings were as diverse as the groups of Jews who produced them. But common themes did emerge as Jews of various backgrounds and ideologies made sense of Jewish life within America's open society. Successive generations of Jews created new renditions of Jewish collective history, tweaking their past in ways that suited their new American identities. These shared versions of the American Jewish past and of America itself were frequently idealized, designed to cement the hope that the United States represented a land of promise and to emphasize a sharp break with the European past. At the same time, optimistic 18

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interpretations of American Jewish life coexisted with a degree of uncertainty about the Jewish future in America—an uncertainty that appeared, sometimes subtly and sometimes in bold strokes, in even the most triumphant accounts of Jewish experience in the United States. As more and more American Jews told their stories and the stories of their new homeland, the narratives never ceased to innovate, but they would also come to rely on these and other themes that began to form a bedrock, a common reference point, for American Jewish experience. The threads that Jews wove together about their collective past in America helped to legitimate the existence of the new Jewish community and to articulate expectations for the future; together, these elements laid the foundation for what I refer to as American Jewish heritage. The use of the term heritage is intentional and provides a crucial perspective for understanding the power of these many-faceted tales. As discussed previously, many scholars have delineated the distinctions between history and heritage.“History tells all who will listen what has happened and how things came to be as they are," explains David Lowenthal. "Heritage passes on exclusive myths of origin and continuance, endowing a select group with prestige and common purpose."6 My approach to heritage, unlike Lowenthal's, assumes the intermingling of history and heritage. While heritage certainly represents "those aspects of history that we cherish and affirm," it provides a clear window into the selective and creative process of American Jewish selfdefinition.7 What emerges throughout these stories is a fascinating blend of fact and fiction. Though it is easy to criticize these accounts for their liberal uses of history, I argue instead that the successive retellings of aflattering,filiopietisticAmerican Jewish past reveal the meanings that Jews assigned to their still evolving encounter with America as well as their expectations for Jewish life in the United States. At times, these narratives might appear merely unseemly historical distortions. Indeed, the stories that Jews told about themselves and about their role in America's history contain a messy blend of truth and myth, everything from verifiable data to historical speculation to outright fabrications. Their accounts were often self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory, and almost always self-serving. They were certainly not subtle, awash as they were with pointed messages about what America meant to Jews and the vital contributions that Jews had made 19

CHAPTER ONE

to American society. As a result, this genre of narrative, told at one time or another by Jews (and nearly every other ethnic and minority group in America), often receives little attention, if not outright dismissal, from scholars. However, grappling with these popular rehearsals of group history lends greater perspective on Jewish interpretations of their American experience, both past and present. Though their flaws may be many, the messiness of these narratives reveals the complex ways that a sense of group identity takes shape when built from the ground up. Jews never intended these evocations of the American Jewish past as dispassionate investigations of history. Rather, they constructed these tales in order to provide lessons for the present. Popular narratives of the American Jewish past should therefore not be measured by the standards of professional history. They are, rather, what Carl Becker described as "the history that common people carry around in their heads," often full of inaccuracies and exaggerations but also delineating and crystallizing the meaning of events.8 In the case of American Jewry, the narratives were newly spun, constructed by immigrants and their children who measured America against their past experiences in Europe. Despite their faults, these accounts provided critical grounding and symbolic meaning for afledglingJewish community. The heritage they created served a crucial purpose, fostering a sense of Jewish belonging in the nation, making room for Jews within American culture, and forging continuity with the long Jewish past—all in the interest of mapping a future for Jews in America.

American Nuances America was certainly not the first place where Jews devised collective histories and myths about how they came to reside in a particular country and why they belonged there. Indeed, both as People of the Book and people of the Diaspora, Jews have told a great number of tales about the many places they have settled. However, the United States presented distinct circumstances in which to craft such narratives. American Jews faced the challenge and, in some respects, the advantage of creating a shared history in a new nation whose cultural patterns were more malleable. Yet, for centuries, Jews had invented 20

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myths that helped to ease their transition to new places of residence and changing circumstances. Centuries of expulsions and migrations frequently left Jews grappling to adjust to new locales. Traditional Jewish thought posited that once Jews were cast out from the Land of Israel, they remained in Galut, in exile, an existential condition that prohibited them from being fully at home in any country where they resided.9 This internal Jewish conception, coupled with governmental policies that generally treated the Jewish community as a separate corporate entity, segregated Jews from the rest of society. Not until the era of Enlightenment and emancipation did Jews (and non-Jews) engage in sustained debates about whether and on what terms Jews could become part of the majority culture and participate in its institutions. But long before the modern period, Jews developed a variety of founding myths to explain the reasons for their settlement in particular countries, as they moved from one region to another. Such legends emerged frequently in the wake of the Spanish Expulsion of 1492, when centuries of Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula came to an end, forcing Jews to resettle in new and unfamiliar places. A tale widely circulated among Jews in the kingdom of Poland posited that after the Expulsion, Jews traveled toward the east and having reached Polish territory, said to themselves, "Poh lin," which means in Hebrew, "Dwell, here." A slightly different version of the story maintains that a note with those words fell from the sky, delivering a divine message to these Jews that they should remain in Poland. The legend purports that this is how the country received its name and also explains why so many Jews came to settle in Poland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 Those Jews who made their way to Amsterdam in the same period created a different set of myths to explain their ability to emerge intact as a community and to practice Judaism openly in Dutch society. According to popular lore, the Amsterdam police raided a private Yom Kippur service in 1595 because they suspected the worshipers were practicing Catholicism, which had been prohibited. After discovering that it was actually a Jewish service, the sheriff asked the participants to offer a prayer to the God of Israel for the government of Amsterdam. As the story goes, when the local magistrate learned of the Jewish congregation's act of loyalty, he immediately granted Jews the right to practice their religion openly. This legend 21

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offers a simplistic explanation for how the conversos (forced converts from Judaism) made their way from the Iberian Peninsula and then were restored as a community in Amsterdam. This story also paints the conversos as consistently loyal to Judaism and ready to embrace their faith publicly under the conditions of toleration offered by the Dutch.11 The creation of these sorts of myths, which have parallels in other countries where Jews settled, reflects a very basic need across cultures to devise meanings from human experience.12 For Jews, who underwent frequent geographic and cultural dislocations, finding meaning— an explanation of how and why events unfolded as they did or a sense of purpose in the face of difficulty—remained especially critical. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Jews confronted more directly the question of whether they could regard the countries they lived in as home, particularly in those nations that hotly debated the question of Jewish emancipation. Rather than requiring myths of origin, the emancipation debates that took place, particularly in France and Germany, prompted Jews to make new arguments about Jewish collective beliefs and the nature of their communities. By crafting narratives designed to demonstrate that Jews could be loyal citizens, Jews hoped to convince non-Jews of their worthiness while also redefining their own identities.13 In France, the first nation to engage in a protracted debate about Jewish emancipation, the "Jewish question" came to the forefront after the 1789 revolution, when the newly adopted doctrine of universal male citizenship made it no longer tenable for Jews to remain "a nation within a nation." Before the Revolution, Jews lived as a separate group in France; they were"Jews living under French rule but not French Jews."14 When the National Assembly resolved to emancipate Jews, it was on the terms that, "The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals."15 Fifteen years later, Napoleon convened an Assembly of Jewish Notables to clarify whether Jews were capable of complete loyalty to France, and the Assembly responded in the affirmative: Men who have adopted a country, who have resided in it these many generations—who, even under the restraint of particular laws which abridged their civil rights, were so attached to it that 22

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they preferred being debarred from the advantages common to all other citizens, rather than leave it—cannot but consider themselves as equally sacred and honourable the bounden duty of defending their country.... The love of the country is in the heart of Jews a sentiment so natural, so powerful, and so consonant to their religious opinions, that a French Jew considers himself in England, as among strangers, although he may be among Jews; and the case is the same with English Jews in France.16 These overstated claims of Jewish loyalty emerged as a result of the quid pro quo inherent in the bargain of Jewish emancipation—a bargain that required Jews to sacrifice a degree of particularity in return for admission to the polity. Notwithstanding the fact that a majority of French Jews retained a sense of ethnic identity that extended across national borders and never truly embraced emancipation on the same terms that it was offered, the prevailing cultural paradigms called upon Jews to retain distinctiveness only in the arena of religion. French Jews felt compelled to demonstrate that they could separate these strands of their identity. Thus, immediately after the National Assembly issued its resolution granting Jewish emancipation, the successful Alsatian merchant and banker Berr Isaac Berr implored his fellow Jews to "divest... entirely of that narrow spirit, of Corporation and Congregation, in all civil and political matters, not immediately connected with our spiritual laws; in these things we must absolutely appear simply as individuals, as Frenchmen."17 France granted Jews citizenship, but the emancipation debates required Jews to assume a defensive posture, to prove their worthiness for citizenship, and to demonstrate that they had the potential to become loyal Frenchmen.18 The citizenship ordeals in several other European nations, though different in their details, revealed the same essential need for narratives that delineated the ways Jews identified themselves with, and could be of service to, their host country. Jews in the United States frequently articulated similar sentiments about their profound allegiance to their homeland, but the reasons behind these expressions differed in key respects. Quite simply, Jews in America would never be summoned as a group before the government to declare their worth, nor would they ever reflect back on a time when they were excluded from the basic rights of citizenship. Although they encountered limitations on their rights in individual states during the 23

CHAPTER ONE

country's early years, Jews became free citizens from the very founding of the nation and thus, generally, exhibited a sense of belonging unparalleled in European settings.19 The United States shared many of the legal patterns evident in Holland and Britain, where rights were gradually extended to Jews without heated debates over emancipation. Yet, while not entirely different in kind, the degree of enfranchisement in the United States remained far more sweeping and comprehensive, at least on the federal level. In this country, Jews never had to overcome either a medieval past or a legacy of having been treated as a separate class in the nation. Equally important, once they arrived in the United States, Jews themselves articulated the notion that "America was different." They frequently referred to their adopted homeland in terms that underscored its unprecedented freedoms. Even new immigrants, who often regarded themselves, and were regarded by others, as foreigners, nevertheless knew that the United States did not possess the history of Jewish exclusion and sometimes oppression that they had often experienced in Europe."I used to marvel how freely I could walk about," recalled one East European Jewish immigrant. "No policeman or gendarme stops me and brusquely demands to see my passport... .Jews speak whatever language they please in public, they wear whatever clothes they wish."20 Of course, immigrants who came to these shores in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may not have been aware of the nation's early history, when Jews indeed confronted legal disabilities in individual states. Jews in the colonies and early Republic encountered a number of restrictions on their activity; they were sometimes denied the right to worship publicly or to hold public office. In 1654, Governor Peter Stuyvesant famously refused admission to thefirstJews who arrived in New Amsterdam until he was overruled by Dutch authorities. Stuyvesant's insistence that "the hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ" and their usurious practices would corrupt the colony reflected prevailing European attitudes, but the Dutch government believed that Jewish economic contributions outweighed such concerns.21 Nonetheless, admission to the New World came with considerable restrictions and ironically, for a brief time, Jewish residents of colonial New Amsterdam enjoyed fewer rights than they had once been granted in Dutch 24

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Brazil. But most of those barriers fell rather quickly, and so while the exceptionalism ofJewish legal status in America should not be overstated, there can be little doubt that the United States rapidly outpaced other nations in the freedoms afforded to its Jewish inhabitants.22 Moreover, despite lingering disabilities and occasional discrimination, American Jews escaped the brunt of the assault on the fundamental nature of Jewish character and behavior leveled by the various strands of the European Enlightenment. Particularly in France and Germany, prevailing stereotypes depicted Jews as morally inferior, engaged in parasitic economic activity, and adhering to a superstitious religion that separated them from the majority culture. The Enlightenment offered the optimistic prospect, articulated most clearly by the Prussian official Christian Wilhelm von Dohm in 1781, that Jews shared a common humanity with non-Jews and could be "improved" so as to become useful members of society.23 Although French Jews were enfranchised quickly in the wake of the Revolution while Jews in the German principalities endured a tortuous, stop-and-start process of emancipation for almost a century, in both places emancipation hinged on the perceived necessity of Jewish moral regeneration. Moreover, many Jewish communal leaders and proponents of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, internalized the message that Jews indeed needed improvement. Criticizing their own communities, they outlined detailed programs for Jewish betterment, urging fellow Jews to embrace secular education, engage in "productive" occupations such as agriculture and crafts, and reform their religious practices.24 Similar antagonisms swept through the Russian Empire, the previous home of most of America's Jewish immigrants. Though the Russian Empire had no such debates about emancipation (because there was no nation-state to which Jews or anyone else could be admitted as citizens), the Enlightenment nonetheless had an impact, resulting in periodic attempts to alter the cultural, educational, and economic Jewish profile and to eliminate Jewish distinctiveness. Historian Benjamin Nathans coined the phrase "selective integration" to describe "the process by which the tsarist state hoped to disperse certain categories of Jews into the Russian social hierarchy." These policies sporadically improved Jewish access to education and the professions, but some of the progress achieved as a result of government initiatives disappeared 25

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after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The ensuing regime of Alexander III brought sporadic eruptions of anti-Semitic violence that largely extinguished Jewish hopes for a future in Russia. Perhaps even more important, his policies reversed the attempt to integrate Jews within Russian society, limiting their legal rights and economic opportunities and drastically curtailing access to education and the professions.25 While the situation for Jews in Eastern Europe began to deteriorate in the late nineteenth century, Jews in Western Europe endured the backlash that followed the Enlightenment and emancipation debates. Optimistic hopes for the creation of a neutral society gave way to an era of romanticism that stressed national folk cultures and the Christian nature of the state. Under these terms, no matter how much they changed or "improved," Jews could never be regarded as an organic part of the majority culture. When they arrived on American shores, Jews retained their minority status, but they encountered decidedly different terms for belonging to the nation and its culture. As Ira Katznelson has explained: On American shores, [Jews] discovered a country marked by a not quite decisive resolution of this battle in favor of liberal outcomes, where the clash between romanticism and the Enlightenment was less stark. In the United States, many of the most pressing issues and problems of minority status were placed within the embrace of Enlightenment liberality, rather than between the Enlightenment and its antagonists.26 As noted previously, the Jewish position within the United States most closely resembled that of the Netherlands and Great Britain, where liberal governments supported policies of toleration and gradually extended rights and privileges to Jews. Yet these nations, which similarly lacked a bitter struggle for emancipation, differed significantly from the United States in their encounter with Jews; both possessed a medieval legacy, wholly absent in the United States, of segregating and sometimes expelling Jews, and both required formal decrees of Jewish toleration and emancipation, even though the process remained less contentious than in other European nations. Thus, in legal terms, the Jewish position in the United States was not entirely exceptional, but the 26

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absence of a protracted history of persecution and exclusion significantly altered the tenor of Jewish expression in America. Perhaps more important than these distinctions, Jews in the United States were generally spared the demands for "improvement" that gripped much of Europe. When they crossed the ocean, generations of immigrants not only became instantly emancipated but they also left behind the lingering debates about Jewish character. While Christian groups certainly attempted to convert Jews on both sides of the Atlantic, Jewish status and citizenship in the United States never rested on the condition that they alter the fundamental nature of their beliefs or behaviors. Sociologist Marshall Sklare has noted that this crucial distinction shaped the ways that Jews adapted within America society. "[T]he acculturation of the Jews," Sklare observed, "could proceed without their feeling that such acculturation was a price exacted if the Jews were to have the same rights as others."27 Rabbi Israel Friedlaender, a turn-ofthe-century immigrant, articulated that sentiment in more forceful terms: "The freedom enjoyed by the Jews [in the United States] is not the outcome of emancipation, purchased at the cost of national suicide, but the natural product of American civilization."28 To be sure, European antagonisms, embedded in the collective experiences and attitudes of immigrants who crossed the Atlantic, reverberated throughout America, but they never impinged on Jewish rights and citizenship. Negative portrayals of Jewish economic activity, religious beliefs, and political behavior endured as a constant undercurrent in American society, just as they had in every other country where Jews resided, and often flared up at particular moments of real or perceived crisis. But lingering notions of Jewish "otherness" never received official sanction in the United States and failed to take hold as a dominant cultural motif. As Ira Katznelson has cogently argued, in the United States, being a Jew was "one way to be an American, whereas in Europe to be a Jew frequently meant not to be a European." Still, as he rightly observes,“to be a Jew in America also meant to be an unusual, and rather vulnerable, kind of American."29 America's Jewish population, reinforced by successive waves of immigration, had experienced firsthand the vicissitudes of Jewish life in Europe and remained constantly wary of any signs that their adopted homeland might succumb to European patterns. American Jews stood 27

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What Every Emigrant Should Know

Figure i. Cecilia Razovsky, What Every Emigrant Should Know, 1922. While serving as executive secretary for the National Council ofJewish Women's Department of Immigrant Aid, Cecilia Razovsky authored this book of advice for prospective immigrants. Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y., and Newton Centre, Mass. © American Jewish Historical Society. All rights reserved. apart from the Christian majority and felt the precariousness of minority status on many occasions. Indeed, many of the narratives that Jews constructed about their history and belonging in America were born from a sense of potential vulnerability. The stories that Jews invented about their encounter with America reflected a determination to belong that surely sprung, whether consciously or not, from so many years of not fully belonging in Europe. But alongside this age-old anxiety, the unique conditions of America's pluralistic society lent a distinct quality to the evolution of Jewish life in the United States and decisively shaped the ways that American Jews recounted their collective history. The distinctiveness of the American experience shows up in a variety of ways in these narratives.Jewish apologetics, for example, emerged 28

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on both sides of the Atlantic, but the tone and tenor of its rhetoric varied in the American context. This staple genre sought to reassure Jews and non-Jews alike that Jews had always been devoted members of the societies in which they lived. European Jews issued repeated refrains that they belonged fully in France, Germany, and England, that they were cultured Russians or loyal revolutionaries. On American shores, such declarations, even when issued defensively, reflected the expectation that America had been and would be a different experience for Jews than any they had had before. In the narratives they created, Jews emerged as insiders in the national culture, participants in its creation, and equal members of American democracy from its inception.30 Historians have long debated the question of American exceptionalism, but American Jews articulated almost universal faith in that doctrine, sometimes lauding the nation for its superior principles of toleration and sometimes, as was often the case among Jewish socialists and in the Jewish labor movement, demanding that it live up to those principles when it fell short of expectations. Over and over, they reiterated that in America, for the first time, Jews stood on equal footing with non-Jews, enjoyed all rights and privileges, and contributed vitally to the national culture. Their self-assured proclamations of belonging reflected an ideal vision of America where Jews would always be secure, but also revealed a kernel of underlying fear that it might not be so. But regardless of their occasional doubts and their regional and class backgrounds, most Jews believed that they belonged in the United States as they had never belonged in Europe. Despite the restrictions and prejudices that they encountered in American society, the United States did not single them out as the "other" so radically as European nations had, in part because America’s pervasive current of racism—epitomized by slavery but also present in so many other aspects of American society—provided a cast of "others" who supplanted Jews as the quintessential outsiders. For all these reasons, the posture and rhetoric of Jews remained comparatively more self-confident and more assertive in America than it had been in most European nations. Ironically, there are parallels between the collective narratives told by American Jews and those created by Zionists. Of course, the situations differed dramatically: Jews in the United States constructed their culture as a minority group in a pluralistic society while Zionists aimed to 29

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build a sovereign state as the majority culture. Moreover, the Zionist project involved reclaiming an ancient Jewish homeland whereas Jews in the United States lived in a newly created liberal society. Yet, in both settings, the rhetoric focused on building a culture in contradistinction to European Jewish experience. Zionist ideology demanded a repudiation of exile, rejected the perceived shackles and degradation of Jewish wandering in Europe and called for a physical and spiritual rebirth in the Land of Israel. The new Jew envisioned by Zionists was strong and confident, no longer subdued by the weight of exile and reinvigorated by life in the national Jewish homeland.31 The archetypal Zionist "has no fear, weakness, or timidity; he has none of the exilic spirit. He is the product of the Land of Israel, the outcome of generations' hopes, and he stands in contrast to the Jew of Exile."32 In the United States, the repudiation of European experience was less ideologically potent, but nonetheless present. Jews believed that America offered them an opportunity to overcome the hardships of Europe and begin new lives in a free society. Only a tiny minority of Jewish immigrants to America embraced the notion of working the land that was so fundamental to the Zionist outlook, but the idea that life in America would rejuvenate Jews both spiritually and physically suffused the narratives produced by American Jews. The author Nahum Mayer Shaikevich, who wrote under the pseudonym Shomer, migrated to the United States from Eastern Europe in 1889 and described America as a place where Jews "discovered their abilities and vigor."33 The Zionist typology of the "new Jew," a highly gendered image that emphasized the reclamation of Jewish manhood, had an American corollary, articulated by the prominent Jewish communal leader Louis Marshall. Marshall insisted that once in America,“the consciousness of manhood, recognized, coursed through [the Jew's] veins as the sap flows through the forest in the spring-time. The eyes accustomed to the furtive look, the back bent in abject cowardice, the voice that dreaded its own echo, were transfigured by the miracle of liberty."34 Some years earlier, Isaac Mayer Wise, the leader of Reform Judaism, had insisted, "The Jew must become an American, in order to gain the proud self-consciousness of the free-born man."35 Another observer noted the creation of a new "species" of Jew in America, the "American Jew who is both modern and Jewish, who combines American energy 30

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and success with that manliness and self-assertion, which is imbibed with American freedom."36 In his 1897 poem,"Statue of Liberty," the socialist immigrant Yiddish poet Avrohom Liessin vividly portrayed the United States as a land of redemption, capable of transforming Jews in body and soul: From the dark, medieval night, from a world of plunder, a world of war, of the oppressive yoke, of rivers of blood, of the pious cross and the grievous knout, the free set forth courageously across the sea to a distant shore.... Oh come, ye wanderers, ye persecuted: from crammed and stifled worlds, come here to endless tracts. Oh come, ye brave ones, ye free ones: Here you'll gather newfound might. To you we extend a hearty welcome. In the New World, beyond the Atlantic, lies a wide-open miraculous land, where Man, freed from tyranny, grows free and proud with a spirit that knows no bound and a will forged of steel.37 Jewish immigrants often testified to the profound changes that they experienced in the American environment. George Price came to the United States from Russia in 1882, became a leading physician in this country, and regularly contributed reports to the Russian Jewish press about the conditions of American Jewish life. Price candidly chronicled the hardships experienced by immigrants, but he also couched his assessment with an eye toward America's transformative power. Recalling "the poor, downtrodden, frightened inhabitants of the well-known Pale, over whose head hung the Damoclean sword of cruel injustice, who trembled like a leaf at the appearance of the sheriff or policeman," he described how the immigrant Jew had become "a free, independent and upright American Jew," brimming with "self-respect" and "strength." Price's account contained scathing depictions of the harsh working

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environment, desperate poverty, and poor housing conditions encountered by Jewish immigrants, yet he could not ignore the "extraordinary metamorphosis" that occurred in America.38 Similarly, Mary Antin's relentlessly idealistic autobiography chronicles the remaking of Jewish identity and the first stirrings of patriotic feelings for her new home. She rhetorically asks about her native Russia, "Where had been my country until now? What flag had I loved?" She recalled, "We knew what it was to be Jews in exile.... As to our future, we Jews in Polotzk had no national expectations.... So it came to pass that we did not know what my country could mean to a man. And as we had no country, so we had no flag to love." Her autobiography, deliberately titled The Promised Land, goes on to describe her journey to embrace all that America had to offer, to become "an American among Americans . . . free to fashion my own life."39 Although with a different tenor and purpose than Zionists who imagined a national home in Palestine, and with a decidedly more individualistic bent, American Jews endowed their adopted homeland with the power to help Jews overcome the European past, reclaim their authenticity, and begin anew as Jews, free men and women, and American citizens. Idealistic portraits of America abounded in Jewish writings and popular lore on both sides of the Atlantic, but that did not mean that all Jews abandoned hope for their European homelands. Despite deteriorating conditions and disappointed expectations, and even as scores of Jews left their native lands and many redirected their hopes for Jewish life toward revolutionary movements and Zionism, some European Jews continued to maintain their devotion to Jewish life in Europe. Religious leaders and intellectuals, in particular, considered America a cultural wasteland and argued that only in Europe could Jews sustain a meaningful Jewish culture. In 1905, a particularly violent year in Russia, the prominent Hebrew poet Chaim Nahman Bialik was living in the vibrant Jewish community of Odessa and wrote a "note of lament" to his friend Sholem Aleichem when he chose to leave for America, reminding him that "no country was as good [for Jews] as Russia, no city as good as Odessa."40 Despite such sentiments, Jews at the turn of the century continued to leave the East in unprecedented numbers, and though most journeyed to America, many settled in Western Europe. Here, too, Jews could be heard expressing great hopes for Jewish life in 32

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a new setting. A popular saying among Jewish immigrants in France extolled, "Leben vi got in Frankraykh" ("To live like a God in France"), epitomizing Jewish expectations for a future in the nation that first emancipated its Jews.41 Even in the midst of World War I, after millions of Jews had abandoned Russia and headed to Western countries, one Jewish newspaper declared,"Russian Jews... are inseparably allied with our mother country where we have been living for centuries and from which there is no power that can separate us—neither persecution nor oppression."42 America clearly was not the sole object of idealized Jewish aspirations. Nevertheless, only the Zionist movement outpaced the rhetoric of rebirth and complete renewal that America inspired. Such lofty expectations for Jewish life in America also produced a counternarrative, particularly from recent Jewish immigrants who found that the United States did not initially live up to its promise. Like many other newcomers of his generation, Abraham Kohn, who came to the United States from Bavaria in 1842, struggled to make a living as a peddler in his early years in America. Writing in his diary, he lamented, "O, that I had never seen this land, but had remained in Germany, apprenticed to a humble country craftsman! Though oppressed by taxes and discriminated against as a Jew, I should still be happier than in the great capital of America, free from royal taxes and every man's religious equal though I am!"43 Jews recognized the greater freedoms that America offered, but liberty could not mitigate the vicissitudes of poverty and the difficulties of adjusting to a new environment. The image of America as a land that Jews could possess as they never could in Europe ran as a constant theme in Jewish narratives, but so too did disappointment in the harsh living conditions that immigrants encountered. In one of her short stories, the writer Anzia Yezierska outlined her expectations for America as well as her subsequent disillusionment. "In America is a home for everybody," she wrote optimistically about her hopes for a new life in the United States. "The land is your land, not as in Russia, where you feel yourself a stranger in the village where you were born and reared—the village in which your father and grandfather lie buried." After her arrival, Yezierska reevaluated her adopted homeland: "I looked about the narrow streets of squeezed-in stores and houses, ragged clothes, dirty bedding oozing out of the windows, ash-cans and garbage-cans cluttering the side-walks. A vague sadness pressed down 33

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Figure 2. Pushcart vendors on New York's Lower East Side, 1930. As part of a study conducted by the Graduate School for Jewish Social Work, students documented life on New York's Lower East Side. Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y., and Newton Centre, Mass. © American Jewish Historical Society. All rights reserved. my heart—the first doubt of America.... Where is the golden country of my dreams?"44 The trope of expectation followed by disappointment emerged as a theme throughout Jewish accounts of first encounters with America, punctuated by a particularly sharp critique from the Jewish left about the exploitative nature of the American capitalist system. The Yiddish songwriter Eliakum Zunser penned "The Golden Land," a widely popular song among American Jewish immigrants that attacked the corruption of American industry and the cult of money while exposing the plight of impoverished workers: In the narrow streets, where the mass stands compressed, There are many poor and miserable, unhappiness is on every face; They stand from morning till night,

34

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Their lips parched and burned. One sacrifices his child for a cent, Another is thrown from his dwelling for not paying rent, Many immigrants in depressed mood, Fall from hunger on the street, Much poverty and sickness, too, Are all found in this golden land. The worker's lifeflowsaway here In a river of his own sweat; He toils during the busy season and starves in the slack And is always in fear of losing his job. ... The proletarian has as much worth here As the horses pulling the streetcars, Running, running until he falls ... 4 5 While en route to America, Zunser had written a very different, decidedly more hopeful description of an imagined Jewish life in the United States. His poem "Columbus and Washington" canonized the discoverer and first president of America, two figures who would become ubiquitous in Jewish writings. Each stanza recounted a different Jewish character from Eastern Europe—an artisan, a young woman, a merchant, an actor, and others—who thanked the two American heroes for liberating them from Russia.46 For Zunser, like so many others, the vibrancy of their optimism in an imagined America was often matched by the ferocity of their disappointment in the actual America. Precisely because they had placed such lofty hopes in America in the first place, Jewish immigrants passionately lamented their initial encounters with poverty and injustice. Abraham Cahan, editor of the popular socialist Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward recalled that before coming to America, "I could only conceive of America as a brand-new country, and everything in i t . . . was to be spick and span." Once in the United States, he admitted, "My idea of America had so little to do with what I now saw before me."47 Despite such disappointments, Cahan and other socialists never completely lost faith in America. Although he sharply denounced capitalism and the corruption of America's business and political system, Cahan still wrote

35

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Figure 3. Men working in a clothing factory, circa 1900. Images like these captured the difficult conditions that new immigrants endured. Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y., and Newton Centre, Mass. © American Jewish Historical Society. All rights reserved. enthusiastically about the empowerment and energy that he derived from American life: I felt America’s freedom every minute. I breathed freer than I had ever breathed before.... America was, in a literal sense, a new world, a strange world, a disagreeable world, but also a challenging world that strengthened me with a strong, healthy odor like that of a freshly plowed field. America intrigued me, puzzled me. It seemed to me that America lives more in one day than Russia does in ten.48 For all of its potency, the theme of dashed expectations turned out to be one of the least enduring characteristics within American Jewish narratives, lasting for only about a generation. As will become clear in 36

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later chapters, other themes, such as the claim that Jews were part of the nation in its formative moments and shared the essential values of American democratic culture, emerged consistently throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The harsh criticism of America's evils peaked primarily during the era of mass migration from Eastern Europe, lasted through the 1920s, gained currency again during the Great Depression, but gradually faded once American Jewry became better established and more secure. The disappointment in America's promise retained power in the labor movement and then generally softened with the upward mobility of Jews in the post-World War II era. And in many respects, the pointed critiques of the leftists represent the most profound example of the fundamental Jewish belief in America's potential."We had a vision," socialist Pauline Newman explained, "that justice and freedom and everything else we desired would be there."49 Even the harshest critics of the failures of the American dream seem to have accepted the notion that America was a place of special destiny for Jews.

Making America Their Own To celebrate the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, Philadelphia residents staged an elaborate parade in which the leader of the city's synagogue walked arm in arm together with "the clergy of the different christian denominations." Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, witnessed the event and described it as "a most delightful sight," reflecting a nation "which opens all its powers and offices alike, not only to every sect of christians, but to worthy men of every religion." After the parade, participants enjoyed a festive meal, which included a special kosher table so that Jews could observe their own religious customs. In this early public moment in American Jewish history, Jews appeared as equal shareholders of the national culture, even as they retained a degree of particularity. Nevertheless, Rush explained that the invitation to ministers of all faiths was purposely designed to demonstrate "the influence of a free government in promoting christian charity."50 For Rush and many other Americans, the new nation was inclusive and pluralistic, but the dominant culture remained Christian. 37

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Although they certainly understood their minority status—the norm for Jews the world over—Rush's America was not the one that Jews imagined. For American Jews, the country might be inhabited by a Christian majority, but it was not a Christian nation. In their versions of the American story, Jews forcefully asserted their equal rights and citizenship and clung tenaciously to the doctrine of separation of church and state. Moreover, Jews proclaimed their organic role in American society and staked a claim to its founding. Their culture, they maintained, provided a thread essential to the weave of the national fabric. Never foreigners or outsiders in their renditions of American history, Jews painted an idealized portrait of their people's integral relationship to America, both past and present. The notion of belonging fully and unconditionally emerged as one of the most dominant narrative strategies that Jews used in crafting their vision of America. In innumerable iterations, American Jews created a myth of America as the new Zion, an alternate form of the Promised Land. This trope proved so successful and enduring in Jewish narratives partly because it already had a long history in American culture. The Puritans' fascination with the Hebrew Bible and their self-designation as God's chosen "new Israel" laid the foundation for American identification with the ancient Hebrews and their Scriptures. Biblical typologies became a central paradigm to define the experiences of many different peoples in America, and the nation's leaders unfailingly cited biblical passages and referred to biblical heroes and texts in their public proclamations. "The Bible," as one historian has argued," was woven into the warp and woof of American culture."51 In constructing the "new Promised Land," Americans imagined themselves worthy successors to the divine community of ancient Israel. Although they may have been relatively unfamiliar with Jews and Judaism, Americans knew of the ancient Israelites through the Old Testament and from the nation's inception, they built its central myths around biblical narratives. American Jews seized upon that cultural motif in their own rhetoric, using it to shape their own narratives about the Jewish role in American society. In 1885, Oscar Straus, a founder of the American Jewish Historical Society who later served in President Theodore Roosevelt's cabinet, published The Origin of Republican Form of Government in the United States of America. Insisting that the ancient Hebrews had created 38

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the first "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," Straus argued that the Jews had established "a pure democratic-republic under a written constitution" centuries before the rise of Christianity.52 This boastful claim credited Jews with inventing the principles of republican democracy, assigning Jews a fundamental role in the creation of America. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such assertions became familiar refrains in the writings and public proclamations of American Jews. Prominent Reform Rabbi Emil Hirsch expressed the same sentiment twenty years later when he bluntly declared that"In the Mayflower, our Bible crossed the Atlantic. At Plymouth Rock in sober reality the Pentateuch was recognized as one of the inspirations of the young commonwealth."53 These claims may have been most common among middle- and upper-class Jews who had migrated from Central Europe, many of whom identified with the Reform movement once they settled in the United States, but they could also be heard among East European immigrants. Hebrew poet and editor Gershon Rosenzweig, who elsewhere wrote biting satires about Jewish life in America, declared in the preface to his Hebrew translations of "The Star Spangled Banner" and "America" that "The youngest nation is heir to the oldest, and all that was best in the Jewish nation is now in possession of the American nation to be developed and cultivated for all humanity."54 Through such self-congratulatory retellings of American history, Jews rendered themselves "present at the creation."55 In the process, American Jews also subtly mimicked the traditional memory practices so central to Judaism itself, rehearsing the Jewish role in the nation's founding just as they might ritually reenact the Exodus from Egypt at Passover or the giving of the To rah at Sinai during the holiday of Shavuot. This common tactic was not a counterhistory in the strictest sense. Jews made no attempt to overturn America’s self-designation as the divine successor to biblical Israel, but tried rather to subvert the Christian nature of that claim by reinserting Jews into the story and allotting them a primary share of the founding myth. While this strategy was most common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, popular renditions of American Jewish history continued to replicate this narrative for years to come. One pupil's workbook in American Jewish history, published by the Reform movement in the 1940s, asked 39

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students to indicate whether the following statements were true or false: "The Puritans were so influenced by the Old Testament that they modeled many of their laws and political institutions after those of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth" and "Men like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson looked to the Old Testament rather than the New Testament for guidance and inspiration." Both statements were to be marked as true.56 American Jews stressed time and again that their forebears had been part of the nation since its inception. These proclamations were part apologetics and part communal self-definition. In 1905, when American Jews celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Jewish settlement in America with an elaborate ceremony at New York's Carnegie Hall, one speaker after another underscored the Jewish role in the nation's founding. A defensive tone was palpable in the remarks of communal leader Louis Marshall, who took it upon himself to refute the "popular fallacy that the Jew has been a latecomer on American soil; that he has been unwilling to undergo the hardships of the pioneer." Articulating a Jewish version of America's origins, Marshall continued, "[W]hen we remember that the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, was in 1607, that of the Dutch at New Amsterdam in 1614, that of Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and that the first settlement of the Jews in New York occurred in 1655, the latter are to be regarded as of equal rank with the most ancient American settlers."57 Asserting Jewish "equal rank" constituted a primary agenda at the celebration, but in the process, the participants established a narrative of American Jewish history that fit perfectly with the prevailing mythology of America. To that end, as we will see in the following chapter, Jews drew frequent parallels between themselves and the Puritans and also underscored their participation in Columbus's voyage in ways that placed Jewish footprints on American soil at the very moment of its discovery by Europeans. In addition to situating themselves in the opening chapter of American history, Jews also emphasized the compatibility between their traditions and American values, rhetorically removing any hint of contradiction between the two. Rabbi Emil Hirsch's proclamation that "Judaism and fundamental Americanism are one" was a prime example of a belief that became ubiquitous in Jewish circles by the start of the twentieth 40

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century.58 Labeling this phenomenon the "cult of synthesis," historian Jonathan Sarna identifies it as "the belief that Judaism and Americanism reinforce one another, the two traditions converging in a common path."59 This pattern in American Jewish culture actually consists of different strands, some stressing the essential parallels between the two traditions and seeing them as identical in purpose, others focusing on the pluralistic character of the nation that enabled distinct religions and cultures to thrive. The former found its most common expression among leaders of the Reform movement in America, who during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embraced the notion of America as the new Zion. They argued that Judaism represented solely a religious confession and rejected any notion of Jews as a nation or a distinct culture. Not surprisingly, Reform leaders frequently declared that Jewish and American beliefs ran on parallel tracks. Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, president of the Hebrew Union College, insisted that the words "American Judaism" represented "the triumph of the world's two greatest principles and ideals, the consummation of mankind's choicest possessions, the one offered by the oldest, the other by the youngest of the great nations of history." According to Kohler's parallel construction of cultures, Judaism represented "the highest moral and spiritual" purposes, while America reflected the "highest political and social aim of humanity."60 By defining Jewish and American traditions as essentially identical and emphasizing their convergence, such rhetorical flourishes removed all impediments to Jewish belonging in America. The other strategy employed by American Jews was to stress the nation's commitment to embracing diverse cultures. Here, rather than arguing that Jewish and American values were fundamentally alike, Jews made the case that America's pluralistic society allowed not only various religions but also various cultures to thrive. "The true American spirit," proclaimed Israel Friedlaender in 1907, "understands and respects the traditions and associations of other nationalities, and on its vast area numerous races live peaceably together, equally devoted to the interests of the land."61 When Friedlaender uttered those words in the early twentieth century, that vision of America was hotly contested in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles. The arrival of millions of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe prompted a nativist backlash among those Old 41

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Stock Americans who feared that "foreigners" were undermining the essential character of the nation. "These immigrants," declared a 1902 Harper's Weekly article,“make very undesirable additions to our heterogeneous population."62 Even Progressives, who generally embraced immigrants, urged them to "Americanize," to learn English, discard superstitious customs, and conform to American norms of behavior. The Constitution explicitly protected religious diversity, but a strong current in American society rejected the maintenance of distinct cultures as antithetical to American ideals. More established members of the American Jewish community, many of them the children of Reform Jews who had arrived from Central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, also encouraged East European immigrants to shed foreign traits as quickly as possible. At virtually the same time that Friedlaender expressed his vision of an America that supported diverse cultures, Reform Rabbi David Philipson denounced such a notion, expressing confidence that the“ghettoism, romanticism, neo-nationalism and neoorthodoxy" of the new immigrants would be erased through Americanization. He insisted that Yiddish language and culture, Jewish nationalism, and other "fads" would and should quickly fade as East European immigrants accommodated to the currents of American life.63 Friedlaender and Philipson articulated divergent conceptions of the essence of Judaism and Jewish culture and also put forward selective readings of American democratic ideals. Foreshadowing the notion of cultural pluralism, Friedlaender imagined that Jewish and American culture would operate as concentric rather than intersecting circles."In the great palace of American civilization we shall occupy our own corner, which we will decorate and beautify to the best of our ability," Friedlaender declared. As the Jewish community grew in the twentieth century, the legitimate boundaries and expressions of Jewish culture in America remained a matter of contestation among the nation's Jews. Nevertheless, despite their considerable disagreements, all participants in the debate articulated an abiding faith in the successful outcome of American-Jewish symbiosis, even if they defined it in different terms.64 Those who defended the maintenance of a distinct Jewish culture in America produced new interpretations of the principles of American democracy, mapping the contours of an America that made room for their cultural expressions. These Jewish readings of American ideals 42

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used the language of American liberty and tolerance to defend Jewish particularism. In this respect, demonstrating the compatibility of Jewish and American cultures also involved a concerted effort to preserve Jewish tradition in an open society. The Yiddishist and socialist Chaim Zhitlowsky, for example, championed the notion of creating a Jewish national minority culture in America, with Yiddish as its language. Defending the legitimacy of his program for the Jewish future, he insisted: We are living in one of the freest countries known in history, a country which cannot deny any group the right to live as it wishes, provided, of course, that it be devoted to the political and social progress of the land, and on the condition that this group love the free character of America's institutions and laws—provided, of course, that these institutions and laws indeed are free and just.65 Although only a tiny segment of America's Jews embraced Zhitlowsky s program, it is worth noting that he measured whether the country was "free and just" by the rights granted to minority cultures. Most American Jews were not willing to go as far as Zhitlowsky in advocating Jewish particularism; they wanted to maintain a degree of distinctiveness while becoming part of the majority culture. Nevertheless, Jews across the political spectrum regularly defended their ability to maintain a distinct culture in the United States as a litmus test for the health of American democracy. The philosopher Horace Kallen, who gave full expression to the notion of cultural pluralism, defined America as "a democracy of nationalities." Kallen insisted that ethnic and national groups brought unique contributions to American society that enriched the national culture. "Democracy," he wrote,"is anti-assimilationist. It stands for the acknowledgement, the harmony, and organization of group diversities in cooperative expansion of the common life, not for the assimilation of diversities into sameness."66 In his seminal 1915 "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," Kallen argued forcefully that "Americanization has liberated nationality."67 A host of American rabbis, from Judah Magnes to Stephen Wise to Mordecai Kaplan, issued variations of this theme, creating a counternarrative used to oppose those who denounced cultural pluralism in favor of the assimilationist goal of 100 percent Americanism. 43

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In the second decade of the century, when Louis Brandeis embraced the nascent and still controversial Zionist movement, the future Supreme Court Justice provided his own twist to this rhetoric, issuing his celebrated proclamation that "loyalty to America demands . . . that each American Jew become a Zionist."68 Borrowing the language of cultural pluralism, he insisted: "Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with Patriotism. Multiple loyalties are objectionable only if they are inconsistent."69 Both Horace Kallen and Louis Brandeis repeated familiar refrains about the harmony of Jewish and American ideals. Kallen celebrated the "Hebraic note" that shaped American culture through the Old Testament and its prophetic tradition, while Brandeis proclaimed that the "Jewish spirit i s . . . essentially modern and essentially American."70 The underlying assumption that Jewish and American cultures shared fundamental values remained at the heart of all these arguments, and that axiom was used to legitimate a degree of Jewish distinctiveness, as long as those differences did not threaten the democratic consensus. These readings of American ideals, which became a virtual credo among a significant and growing portion of the Jewish community by the mid-twentieth century, constituted a pointed Jewish response to the dominant ideology of the American melting pot. At precisely the same time that Kallen and Brandeis argued for cultural pluralism based on legitimate group differences, President Woodrow Wilson declared, "America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group has not yet become an American."71 The rhetoric of Jewish-American symbiosis constituted more than mere apologetics. Rather, it emerged as a strategy to counter the claims of those who objected to "hyphenated Americans." It challenged and redefined the parameters of American democracy and carved out a space for Jewish culture in America.

The Meaning of America in Jewish History Just as Jewish narratives about America endeavored to position Jews within American society, so, too, did they attempt to place America in the larger context of Jewish history. Jews in the United States could not conceive of their lives apart from the long centuries of Jewish experience, 44

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and in the American Jewish quest for self-understanding the comparative gaze toward Europe emerged as a constant thread. Like all immigrants, Jewish newcomers naturally compared their new lives in America to what they had known in their previous homelands. Max Lilienthal, who had earlier been brought from Germany to Russia by Tsar Nicholas I to introduce an Enlightenment curriculum into theJewish schools, came to New York in 1845 and wrote back to the German press with a glowing report on America. "My greetings as a brother and friend from New York, from the God-blessed land of freedom, from the beautiful soil of civic equality," Lilienthal exulted. "Old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a dream."72 Of course, as we have seen, many immigrants did not share such enthusiasm about their initial encounters with the United States. Thousands ofJews who arrived in crowded immigrant neighborhoods could only wonder, "Was this the America we had sought? Or was it only, after all, a circle that we had traveled, with a Jewish ghetto at its beginning and its end . . . ?"73 But most immigrants and their children, whatever their initial fears, did not consider their transplantation to the United States a circular journey and eventually came to evaluate America as far more desirable than the European countries they had left behind. Once established in America, Jews tended to look back at their "unhappy and miserable brethren in Europe," regarding them with a mixture of empathy and nostalgia, even while advocating on their behalf and offering assistance.74 For American Jews, reflection upon Europe served as a rubric for judging life in the United States. The European gaze was not without its contradictory components. On the one hand, American Jews celebrated the greater freedoms that America offered, constantly juxtaposing the restrictions and limitations of Europe to the openness and opportunity of America. Their rhetoric often conveyed a sense of superiority, implying that once liberated from the hardships of Europe, Jews could become truly fulfilled both as Jews and as free citizens. This ultimately emerged as a dominant motif within American Jewish life, despite the fact that Jews, particularly new immigrants, often expressed doubts about their future in the United States as well as frustration and disappointment when their adopted homeland failed to meet their lofty expectations. At the same time, an undercurrent of inferiority consistently haunted American Jewish life. 45

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Europe (flattened into a single undifferentiated whole in many of these characterizations) may have been associated with persecution and economic privation, but Jewish culture had flourished there for centuries. American Jews expressed some anxiety that their society did not measure up when compared to a European past "replete with incomparable scholarly distinction, a voracious, widespread intellectual hunger that was lost as Jews were transplanted across the Atlantic."75 This assessment, though probably more common among intellectual and cultural elites, retained power among American Jews, even as they expressed increasing confidence in the promise ofJewish life in the United States. The desire to create a shared history and heritage of their own certainly derived, in part, from an attempt tofillthe void created when they left behind that long, rich European Jewish past. More commonly, American Jewish references to life in Europe stressed the sharp break with the past that occurred on American soil. The new chapter of Jewish history that began in the United States stood in stark contrast to everything Jews had previously experienced. From speeches to memoirs to institutional publications, comparisons between the freedom of America and the repression of Europe permeated the narratives of American Jews. The author of one of the first surveys of American Jewish history asserted confidently that the United States would never give rise to "a Jewish problem in the sense in which this term is understood in the overcrowded and illiberal countries of the Old World."76 The vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), one of the most important agencies established by East European Jews to help fellow immigrants, attributed the success of the organization to the American environment, even claiming that Jews were able to fulfill Jewish precepts in the United States in ways that had been impossible in Europe: As a result of religious intolerance which European Christiandom [sic] inherited from its pagan predecessors, the European Jew was seldom more than an alien in his native land. As an exile or stranger he therefore became a wanderer, ever seeking a place of refuge from religious persecution, a house where he could worship God in security and live in peace. American tolerance has made it possible for the American Jew to put into practice the Biblical injunction to extend the hand of friendship to the 46

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homeless and stranger, commonly known as Hachnosass Orchim (harboring strangers).77 The main character in Anzia Yezierska's Breadgivers was less analytical in her embrace of the greater possibilities available to Jews, and particularly to Jewish women, in America. "Thank God, I'm not living in olden times," she declared. "Thank God, I'm living in America!"78 If Europe provided a yardstick to measure the potential for Jewish life in America, it also served as a recurring backdrop for the stories that Jews told about the new American chapter in Jewish history. "All beginnings contain an element of recollection," explains sociologist Paul Connerton. "This is particularly so when a social group makes a concerted effort to begin with a wholly new start."79 The European past became a touchstone for evaluating the meaning of the American Jewish experience, often serving as a counterexample that illuminated the liberty of America but also providing a context for interpreting America in the longue durée of Jewish history. The events of 1492, ideally suited to position Jews in the most pivotal moment of both the American and Jewish past, emerged as a recurrent theme in American Jewish narratives. American Jews exhibited a particular interest in establishing a Jewish role in the voyage of Christopher Columbus, which will be discussed at length in the following chapter. Their renditions of the Columbus story placed Jews at the dawn of American history, but equally important, provided closure and continuity with a painful epoch in the Jewish past. "Where the history of the Jews in Spain ends, that of the Jews in America begins," wrote Meyer Kayserling, a scholar hired by the fledgling American Jewish Historical Society in the 1890s to investigate the Jewish role in Columbus's mission. "The Inquisition is the last chapter in the record of the confessors of Judaism on the Pyrenean peninsula and its first chapter in the western hemisphere."80 Eager to document their founding role in the nation, American Jews embraced Kayserling's findings, but the coupling of the Spanish Inquisition with the discovery of America also endured as a way to explain the significance of the United States in Jewish history. As late as the 1930s, one popular account of American Jewish history spelled out the connection: In the shifting drama of the fortunes of people which is history, Columbus was the deus ex machina for the Jews. They had come 47

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in 1492 to their darkest hour. They were a homeless people mourning their past. Their eyes turned backward. The future held its empty cup before them, mocking, challenging. Life was a dirge at the grave of buried splendor. A people with its back to the wall—and then America—a new world! For the Jew, shelter, new life, escape from persecution.... America ransomed the Jew.81 In these retellings, the United States emerged to rescue European Jewry. The Jewish community that took shape so far from the centers of Jewish culture no longer represented a remote outpost or signified a rupture with the Jewish past, but rather heralded the dawn of a new, more glorious epoch in Jewish history. In the twentieth century, as the world's Jewish population increasingly shifted toward the United States, Jewish leaders more frequently described the United States as the country responsible for sustaining Jewish life. Bernard Revel made precisely this claim when campaigning for the newly created Yeshiva College in the 1920s. With the conditions of Jewish life in Europe steadily deteriorating, Revel explained, "to a great degree world Jewry is coming to look for its spiritual strength to America." His assertion that "the mantle of responsibility is descending upon American Jewry" became a familiar refrain. Through such rhetoric, whether in speeches or popular histories, American Jews transformed the country with no Jewish past into the redeemer of Jewish civilization.82 Memories of Europe invariably illuminated Jewish expectations for life in America, invoking both the immediate and distant past. Painting the whole of European Jewish history with a broad, gloomy brush, one author described the "monotonous sameness about the history of the Jews in Europe."83 At the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Jewish settlement in the United States in 1905, Louis Marshall underscored the conditions facing Jews throughout Europe at the time when the first Jews arrived on American shores. Recalling that America was founded "at the lowest ebb" in Jewish history, Marshall offered a dismal synopsis of European Jewish experience: Driven from England in 1290, for 365 years no Jew had been permitted to live in the land which has become the mother of freedom. Driven from Spain in 1492, and shortly thereafter from

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Portugal, none of Jewish stock, save the Marranos, whose outward lives were the incarnation of falsehood, dwelt upon the Iberian Peninsula. In 1648, the Cossack uprising under Chmielnicki transformed the dream of peace and prosperity of the Russian and Polish Jews into the horrible reality which has ever since overwhelmed them with an avalanche of misery, wretchedness, and degradation. The Jews of Germany and Austria dwelt within Ghetto walls, and suffered from every species of insult, contumely, and discrimination. In France and Italy the Jew was a Pariah and an outcast.84 The unfolding of the American Jewish story contrasted vividly with this sweeping depiction of the miseries of Europe. Bringing his narrative into the present, Marshall offered his hope that "the consciousness of the rights of manhood might beat in the bosoms of the oppressed everywhere with the same force and virility that it did in the breasts of our Jewish pioneers!" If such a transformation could occur, Marshall reasoned, Russian Jews might escape the "unspeakable brutality" that had turned the streets of the Pale of Settlement into "slaughter pens and reeking shambles."85 In such historical reflections, American Jews used a selective reading of the European Jewish past to highlight the freedoms offered to Jews in the United States. Europe served as a countermodel; in other words, it defined the potential for Jewish life in America by opposition. In the 1890s, the renowned Yiddish playwright Joseph Lateiner offered American Jewish theatergoers a dramatic representation of the contrast between Europe and America. His play Exile from Russia, a tragic melodrama of the Yiddish theater, depicted in graphic terms the suffering ofJews in Eastern Europe. The play featured Jews being humiliated by Russians and numerous acts of anti-Jewish violence. The popular actor Boris Thomashefsky portrayed the main character, Ossip, who finally chooses to convert after experiencing the vicissitudes of Jewish life and falling in love with a non-Jewish woman. But his decision causes his family to spurn him when he returns to defend them during a pogrom, and he fails to prevent Russian soldiers from carrying out their brutality. The play's harsh portrayal ofJewish life in Eastern Europe concludes with a brief scene set in New York: immigrants dressed in red, white, and blue march behind a band playing"The Star Spangled Banner" in a hopeful 49

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finale that affirms the possibility for Jewish redemption in the United States.86 Once again, we see America emerging to rescue Jews from the anguish of Europe. It is the New World that invents the Old, and by the designation renders it sometimes a prelude to, and sometimes a foil for, American Jewish culture. Lateiner's play closed with onefinaltableau: the Americanflagwaving side by side with scarlet socialist banners. This Yiddish drama thus offers not just an idealistic portrait of the United States but also a very particular ideological portrait, a vision of the new nation in which socialism triumphs as part of the American Dream. The confluence of American redemption and socialist victory is, needless to say, a blend that would have been utterly foreign to most Americans. And yet in this context it makes perfect sense, for it exemplifies the ways that American Jews tailored their heritage in the United States, taking elements from their own culture and selectively stitching them together with dominant national ideals. Ultimately, Lateiner's play was just one of many examples of how American Jews manufactured different versions of an ideal America, reflecting their various backgrounds and ideologies. Louis Marshall, for example, certainly did not share Lateiner's vision of a socialist America, nor did he support Louis Brandeis's call for American Jews to champion Zionism. Jews nurtured a vast array of ideas about both American society and Jewish life in the United States, but they shared a common desire to compose an American script where Jews and Jewish culture claimed a legitimate role, even if they disagreed about what that role should be. Most American Jewish narratives extolled the United States and celebrated its freedom and democracy, and they consistently resisted any conception of the nation that did not allow Jews to claim a presence. Their diverse depictions of America's history and ideals provided an avenue for Jews to define the United States as their own and to express an allegiance to it that reinforced Jewish identity.

Jews and other American Ethnic Groups In the polyglot society of America, Jews had abundant company. Jews were one of many American ethnic groups who crafted historical 50

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narratives and participated in public moments that celebrated their own culture while simultaneously declaring loyalty and allegiance to the American collective. Virtually every religious minority and ethnic group in the United States has engaged in efforts to identify its traditions as wholly compatible with American ideals, thereby sustaining group identity without suggesting separatism. Although white ethnics accomplished this maneuver with less dissonance than people of color, who had a more difficult time extolling America's liberties, Americans of all backgrounds worked to reconcile their particular traditions with the dominant paradigms of American culture.87 As many scholars of American ethnicity and collective memory have noted, the historical narratives and public commemorations of minority groups involved multiple goals: they affirmed the legitimacy of ethnic group survival within the American landscape; they underscored ethnic contributions, passed on "myths of origin," and emphasized internal group continuity and cohesion.88 While ethnic commemorations and popular histories often celebrated the patriotism of their members and suggested a parallelism between the group's ideals and those of America, they also resisted any attempt to eradicate ethnic distinctiveness. Particularly during periods of mass migration, when newcomers were urged to Americanize and divest themselves of traces of "foreignness," the rhetoric employed by ethnic groups carved out a space for cultural particularism as wholly legitimate within the American tradition. While this study cannot engage in a comprehensive comparison of America's various ethnic cultures, it is worthwhile to discuss briefly the similarities between Jewish narrative strategies and those of other ethnic groups, as well as some ways in which Jewish narratives were distinctive. Not surprisingly, founding myths were ubiquitous in American ethnic and religious culture. Christopher Columbus proved to be a particularly malleable ethnic hero, and many different minority groups, including Jews, laid claim to his exploits. In 1882, an organization of Irish men in New Haven, Connecticut, created the Knights of Columbus, paying homage to "the great Catholic discoverer of America." Its founders regarded the designation as a demonstration that "we Catholics were no aliens to this country, but were entitled to all rights and privileges due to such Discovery by one of our faith." By the twentieth century, Columbus had been claimed decisively by Italian immigrants as 51

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their founding hero and proof that they "ought to feel at home here, at least as much as all the rest of the people who sailed from Europe a few generations ahead of us."89 When the nation marked the fourhundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage in 1892, white elites planned many of the large events in New York and Chicago and conceived the celebration in national and patriotic terms that often overlooked recent immigrants. At the same time, however, houses of worship and schools throughout the United States insisted on joining the national festivities, championing the Columbus legend among a broad American constituency.90 Norwegian Americans had their own founding myth, a counter to Columbus, in the figure of Leif Erikson, whom they celebrated as America's true discoverer. In the late nineteenth century, one Norwegian American described how his people "sought a perfect liberty and independence and found them in a land that had first been discovered by our ancestors under the leadership of Leif Erikson." The speaker went on to explain that Norway had nurtured the seeds of democracy in its medieval past and "in America our old plant of liberty found the right soil and it grew and thrived."91 Though Jews liked to point to the Bible as the ultimate origin of American ideals, the Norwegian example demonstrates that many groups took credit for creating America's core principles. Equally invested in underscoring their American roots, in 1883 Germans celebrated the bicentennial of the founding of Germantown, Pennsylvania, marking the occasion with celebrations in several communities, highlighted by large parades showcasing key contributions of German Americans.92 These few examples, which have endless parallels among other ethnic and religious groups, indicate the pervasiveness of such rhetoric in the United States, revealing the powerful desire on the part of all immigrant groups to make America their own. For Jews and other ethnics, such historical narrations and public celebrations established an equality of place in America and allowed them to claim a heritage that was both national and ethnic, simultaneously universal and particular. One of the most common dual expressions of national patriotism and ethnic pride involved the elevation to hero status of lesser known or all but forgotten figures of the American Revolution, frequently by exaggerating their exploits. Regardless of their historical accuracy, these tales were offered as evidence that minority 52

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groups sacrificed on behalf of their country, and indeed helped to bring it into existence. Jews engaged wholeheartedly in this endeavor, most notably through the figure of Haym Salomon (discussed at length in chapter 5), thus joining a chorus of similar efforts by other groups. Members of the American-Irish Historical Society, for example, founded onlyfiveyears after the creation of the American Jewish Historical Society at the close of the nineteenth century, made a concerted effort to honor Revolutionary patriots of Irish descent. Major-General John Sullivan, who served with George Washington, was a particular source of communal pride, and the society helped to erect a monument to him in Elmira, New York, in 1912. Similarly, the Poles lauded the contributions of Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski, and monuments to the two heroes dot the American landscape. At the dedication of the Kosciuszko monument in Chicago's Humbolt Park in 1904, members of the Polish community dressed in both American and native costumes, and the site became a regular gathering place for future ethnic celebrations.93 African Americans also laid claim to Revolutionary heroism through thefigureof Crispus Attucks, killed in the Boston Massacre. As early as 1858, black abolitionists established Crispus Attucks Day, and thirty years later, a monument to him was erected on Boston Common.94 Historian John Bodnar has rightly observed that these efforts were often a product of internal power struggles as much as group pride, and ethnic groups sometimes looked to honor Revolutionary patriots of the past as a way to deflect attention from recent immigrants, seen as less desirable and politically problematic. In large civic celebrations, ethnicity was often managed in the interests of, and sublimated to, larger themes of American democracy and patriotism; this was particularly the case after the 1920s, as Progressives and reformers worked to Americanize the large number of immigrants who had arrived in the preceding decades. Acknowledging ethnic folk culture became a means of demonstrating the country's pluralism, but only if the cultural expressions of ethnics fit easily within paradigms of patriotism and national loyalty.95 The motives behind ethnic commemoration remained complex and nearly always multivocal, but the pervasiveness of the efforts suggests that minority groups in America felt it crucial to establish the legitimacy and authenticity of their imprint on the nation's history. 53

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The same themes, plots, and sentiments emerged so regularly in the popular narratives of ethnic groups that one historian has aptly suggested that these ethnic expressions represent "an American phenomenon."96 Indeed, at times the language of one group could be substituted for another without noticeable difference. Yet, the similarity can be deceptive, obscuring the particular agendas and circumstances of each minority group. The rhetoric about belonging in, sacrificing for, and helping to found the nation and its ideals followed a recurring general pattern. But each group fashioned its mythology out of particular needs and unique historical trajectories, and in the process created a distinct collective history. American Jewish narratives followed a familiar blueprint, but with significant nuance. Unlike most other immigrants, who arrived in America from countries in which they were part of the dominant culture, Jews had always existed as a minority group. They rarely harked back to the culture of any sovereign European nation. For a brief time in the mid-nineteenth century, German Jewish immigrants in America maintained a strong connection to their German heritage. But as historian Naomi Cohen has observed, those sentiments generally faded after 1870, diminished both by increasing Jewish acculturation and by the arrival of German immigrants imbued with a more nationalist political outlook that excluded Jews.97 German Jews knew well the disappointments that accompanied previous Jewish attempts to adopt the values of the majority in Europe; despite their wholehearted embrace of the German culture of Bildung, they continued to be regarded in Germany as outsiders.98 Though theJews who came to America were a varied lot, they nearly all arrived with some history of exclusion and minority status that shaped their outlooks and cultural expressions. Most Jews, particularly immigrants from Eastern Europe, regarded themselves as a disadvantaged minority without a defined national allegiance. Sociologist Ewa Morawska has argued persuasively that once in the United States, non-Jewish East European immigrants developed an ethnic consciousness rooted in national identification with the "Old Country." Their nostalgia contrasted sharply with the outlook ofJewish immigrants, who generally described their homelands as fraught with insecurity and "tended to stress more their new identity as Americans." Although nostalgic descriptions of the shtetl later idealized the intimacy and traditions of the "old" Jewish world, these portrayals never 54

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fostered any sense of nationalism. Rather, the mythologized shtetl cultivated a collective ethnic and religious identity, based on an imagined community that enclosed Jews and sustained them amid the harsh vicissitudes of their surroundings.99 That is not to say that Jewish nationalism maintained no foothold within the American Jewish community. To the contrary, as historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has noted, nationalism "constituted a critical dimension of the immigrants' response to their adopted country."100 Bundists, Zionists, and a host of others kept the fires of Jewish national consciousness burning within American Jewish politics and associational life. Yet, the longing for Zion and the communal and political culture that ultimately prevailed in the United States generally followed the aforementioned model of Louis Brandeis, fusing nationalist aspirations with American ideals. Over the generations, Zionism emerged as one of the most powerful expressions of Jewish civil religion in the United States largely because itfilteredJewish nationalism through an American prism. Like other immigrant groups, Jews believed that in their adopted homeland their own culture would flourish. Yet, unlike other immigrants, Jews possessed no national home, and this led to subtle differences in their expectations of America. Reflecting upon her native Poland, the late-nineteenth-century poet Teofila Samolinska reminded her fellow Polish Americans that, "Here one is free to fight for the Fatherland; / Here the cruelty of tyrants will not reach us."101 Jewish immigrants too often insisted that their culture had been stifled in Europe and couldfinallyblossom in its purest form in the United States, but they offered no rallying cries on behalf of their countries of origin. Some, in fact, went so far as to claim that America offered Jews their first genuine homeland—or at least the potential for one. In a typical formulation, one Reform rabbi declared that the Jew had been "condemned to be a Pariah and an outcast for centuries in European lands," but "here for the first time since the Roman arms conquered his ancient Palestinian domicile, did he find a land which he could call home."102 Despite his radically different politics, socialist Abraham Cahan offered a remarkably similar interpretation of the United States. "America," Cahan proclaimed, "is the new home, the only home of the Jewish people."103 55

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Ironically, as Marshall Sklare has observed, the transition to life in America as a minority culture may have been easier for Jews than for other ethnic groups, precisely because Jews had had prior experience in negotiating that status. But the narratives produced by Jews avoided such analysis, instead focusing on hopeful depictions of America as the nation where Jews might finally create (rather than import) an authentic culture. By the mid-twentieth century, the growth of the Zionist movement in America led many Jews to hope and work for a sovereign Jewish homeland, but for most, this came after they had established an allegiance to the United States, and the overwhelming majority continued to regard America as a genuine and primary Jewish home.104 No two ethnic cultures were identical in their constructions, despite the remarkable similarities of the rhetoric they all used about belonging in America. Minority groups did not deposit their individual cultures into cookie-cutter vessels; theirs were not shared collective histories that varied only in the details. Moreover, the importance of each ethnic group's narratives should not be minimized. Historians have deciphered key aspects of American culture by examining common patterns of ethnic behavior, but the internal history of individual ethnic groups remains instructive and worthy of exploration. This study is mindful of shared archetypes but focuses particularly on the construction of Jewish heritage in America, examining transnational Jewish concerns and the role that America played in broader retellings of Jewish history. These considerations suffused Jewish interpretations of the United States, even as Jews joined other immigrant groups in creating myths that grounded their experience in America. In his pioneering study of American Jews, first published in 1912, Peter Wiernik identified the United States as "the first experiment of its kind" for Jews, a homeland where they enjoyed unconditional freedoms as they never had before.105 The untested terrain of America prompted new forms of Jewish identity and required a different kind of Jewish heritage, suited to a minority group adapting to conditions of unprecedented tolerance. The diverse narratives created by American Jews imposed order and meaning on their encounter with the United States, restructuring Jewish history to include America and interpreting the role that Jews played in the nation's creation and culture. Through their 56

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various renditions of American and Jewish history, Jews invented an American Jewish past infused with expectations for the future of Jewish life in the United States. As they outlined the sort of America they desired, Jews crafted a variety of designs and patterns for American Jewish culture and community. Through myth and filiopietistic history and with a frequent gaze back toward Europe, they envisioned a nation capable of bringing about sweeping transformations in Jewish life. In the process, American Jews gradually forged a shared heritage that gave meaning to Jewish experience in a new nation and allowed them to embrace America on their own terms.

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A

s the nation celebrated its centennial in July 1876, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, representing Judaism's Reform movement, gathered in Washington for its third annual convention. To mark the occasion, the delegates scheduled a break from conference business and traveled to George Washington's gravesite in Mount Vernon.1 The pilgrimage began as they boarded the ship, where aflagwelcomed the party with the Hebrew words "Shalom Aleichem." The group disembarked to musical accompaniment and listened to speeches praising Washington's heroic deeds and passionate commitment to liberty and democracy. Like many others who made the pilgrimage, these Jewish visitors planted a tree at Washington's grave to symbolize "the gratitude which they owe to him and his compatriots."2 In his remarks, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the architect of the Reform movement, noted the appropriateness of this visit. Why, he asked rhetorically, "are the representatives of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the admirers of Moses and the prophets, assembled at the sepulcher of George Washington[?]" Answering his own question, Wise explained that Washington had "fulfilled in the holy cause of humanity that which Moses has written." Both men, according to Wise, had offered a sacred message of liberty, justice, and equality. Both had steered human history toward its best course: "Moses, the son of Amram, and George Washington are the two poles of the axis about which the history of mankind revolves."3 In a rhetorical flourish that employed the most ubiquitous themes in American Jewish life, Wise 58

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neatly paralleled biblical history and American history, setting the fates of Jews and Americans on the same path. With these words, Wise and his congregants took part in one of the most common practices ofJews in America, working from a script that has been performed countless times since the mid-nineteenth century. Jews have long taken advantage of America's national holidays, which provided regular occasions for them to champion the essential compatibility ofJewish and American values and to establish a Jewish presence within American culture. As they participated in national celebrations— from Thanksgiving to Columbus Day to the Fourth of July—Jews asserted their allegiance to the United States while also expressing their vision of what the nation should be. For America's ethnic, racial, and minority groups of all kinds, "the most important function of public holidays was to reconstruct America, to imagine the nation through the eyes of group members."4 Like so many other American groups, Jews seized these public moments as occasions to write themselves into the narratives of American history and to make themselves and their culture pivotal actors in the most fundamental events of the American past. On these days they outlined the parameters of a country that made room for Jews and Judaism and also assessed their own progress in America. When they honored America's heroes and joined in national observances, Jews conjured and performed myriad versions of American history and sketched a Jewish place within it. Jewish celebrations of national holidays became occasions for public retellings of a variety of historical narratives, some more idealized than others, about both America and the Jews. As moments of reflection, national observances provided the opportunity to rehearse the long historicaljourney of the Jewish people, complete with a new coda about the American epoch. In these narratives, references to Europe, whether stated or unstated, provided the backdrop for the American Jewish story, constructing a pole of difference that highlighted Jewish experience in the United States. At the same time, these accounts of Jewish history paid homage to America's self-definition as a nation built by immigrants, offering freedom and opportunity to all its citizens. During public moments of national celebration, Jews often constructed a shared history with America, rooted in a common biblical heritage, as both Jews and their fellow Americans generally identified the "Old Testament" as the 59

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foundation of their cultures. Using biblical metaphors and images of the "Promised Land" as ideological touchstones, Jews claimed a natural affinity between their culture and that of their adopted homeland. In a circuitous fashion, as Jews embraced the freedoms and collective mythology of America as a new Promised Land, their ability to do so became a prooftext of that very definition of America. Their frequency, however, does not mean that these Jewish celebrations were always harmonious, unequivocal endorsements of American society and culture. Indeed, these occasions often contained hotly contested moments, providing opportunities for Jews to critique the state of affairs in their homeland. But even when friction occurred, Jews positioned their culture and American culture in an intimate dialogue, and themselves at center stage in the drama of American history.

Founding Myths Jewish celebrations of national holidays extend back to the very beginnings of the country. Not surprisingly, Columbus Day became one of the most commonly and fervently acknowledged holidays. When Jews celebrated Christopher Columbus, they cemented perhaps the most enduring myth linkingJews with the origins of America. As they honored Columbus, American Jews situated themselves at the roots of the national story, standing alongside the voyager as he discovered the New World. Columbus emerges in Jewish narratives again and again, evidence both of his centrality to Jewish creation myths, but also of the endless and inventive means that Jews used to tell their American stories. The four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landing in 1892 and the attendant Columbian Exposition in Chicago marked the apogee of veneration for Columbus across America. In October 1892, churches and synagogues throughout the country celebrated Columbus; an estimated five hundred services took place in New York City alone. Although some Jewish leaders argued that Jews should not celebrate the occasion as a separate group but rather participate with other Americans in their observances, synagogues joined in the nationwide religious services over Columbus Day weekend.5 Across the country, rabbis 60

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preached sermons praising Columbus's contributions and read special prayers in synagogues that had been decorated with Americanflagsfor the occasion. One rabbi used the anniversary to reinforce the notion of America as a place of shelter and refuge for Jews: "the Jewish people certainly have cause to express gratitude for the hero who founded a haven of repose for our noble race . . . he discovered a country for wandering Israel."6 Columbus Day also provided an opportunity for Jews to establish early footprints on American soil. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (as will be elaborated in chapter 4), dozens of children's stories and popular histories recounted the story of the Jews in Columbus's circle: Luis de Torres, the converted Jew who sailed with Columbus as his interpreter, as well as several other men of Jewish descent, conversos, who purportedly also made the voyage to the New World. Most of these stories originated from the scholarship of the Budapest Jewish historian Meyer Kayserling, who was commissioned by the American Jewish Historical Society to investigate the connections between Jews and Columbus. The elite founders of the society were eager to offer "proof" of the role of Jews in Columbus's voyage, believing that evidence of Jewish participation might somehow reduce anti-Semitism. Kayserling obliged them, uncovering many previously unknown interactions between Jews and Columbus, including information about those who helped finance his voyage and provided him with maps and nautical instruments. We now know that Kayserling was mistaken in his assertion that four men "of Jewish stock" accompanied Columbus on his journey; Luis de Torres was the only crew member of certain Jewish descent. Nevertheless, when his study was published in 1894, it provided a scholarly foundation upon which Jews could rest their claims. The study had little effect in diminishing anti-Semitism but did have widespread impact within the Jewish community, finding its way into scores of popular books, speeches, and sermons.7 On Columbus Day 1918, Rabbi Jacob Stolz relied on Kayserling when he proclaimed,“there was never a time when white people were on American soil in anticipation of Jews."8 By the 1930s, a host of shaky scholarly studies even raised the possibility that Columbus himself was Jewish, born of converso parents. Kayserling never made such a claim, but some scholars and amateur 61

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historians of the twentieth century began to perpetuate the notion of Columbus's supposed Jewish lineage. By midcentury, however, most scholars scoffed at the possibility that Columbus was a "closet Jew."9 Lee Levinger (who will be discussed in detail in chapter 4) wrote in his 1930 American Jewish history textbook, widely used in Jewish schools, "We should be very proud to claim this great explorer and intrepid spirit as a Jew, if the facts warranted it, but it is not possible to do so without real proof."10 Another popular history titledJewish Pioneers in America tackled the issue by first citing the supposed proof of his Jewishness and then asserting that "[w]hether Columbus was a Jew is uncertain. But there is no doubt of the fact that he was materially assisted in his venture by a number of influential Jews."11 The author then offered an account of the Jewish mapmakers, astronomers, advocates, and financial backers from Spain who made Columbus's journey possible. Some of the stories about Jewish involvement with Columbus had merit, and many relied on Kayserling'sfindings,but historical accuracy was not really the point in these narratives. The purpose was to place Jews integrally within the discovery and founding of America. "Jews witnessed the dawn of American history," this same history book proclaimed; they were present at the very moment that the New World was born.12 By 1905, when Jews celebrated the 250th anniversary of Jewish settlement in the United States, the Jewish myth of Columbus had been codified as part of the collective heritage of American Jews. The notion that he may have been a Jew slipped in from time to time, but even without that false claim, Jews championed their people's part in his voyage. In one of many such examples, Philadelphia Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf presented the "facts" about the pivotal role that Jews played in Columbus's journey to an audience gathered at New York's Ninetysecond Street YMHA. Covering the event, the New York Times led with the headline "A Jew First to Land of Columbus's Party," a reference to Columbus's interpreter, Luis de Torres, purported to be the initial member of his crew to set foot in the New World. The bold headline put forward precisely the American legacy that Jews desired.13 The Jewish myth of Columbus had two important components: the first was to assert a Jewish role in the discovery of America, and the second was to narrate the beginning of a new chapter in Jewish history. "Sad, indeed, was the plight of the Jews that year [1492]," declared one 62

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speaker in 1930, "and yet in the same year came the discovery of America. Is it not true that God had again shown Israel, in its hour of need, the Promised Land?"14 Some popular children's books claimed that the conversos who sailed with Columbus had embarked on a distinctly Jewish mission: "the Marranos," one 1939 storybook explained, employing a term often used to refer to conversos at the time, "were seeking a haven for the oppressed Jews."15 Assessing the meaning of the discovery of the New World for Jews, one of the earliest American Jewish history textbooks concluded that "It is our pride that Jews had much to do with that discovery which, without their foreseeing it, finally won for them a new refuge, a home for a far larger Jewish community than medieval Spain had ever boasted."16 The parallel construction of meaning surrounding Columbus's journey chronicled the demise of a once great Jewish civilization while marking the birth of a new one. At the grand 250th anniversary celebration held at New York's Carnegie Hall, a parade of speakers repeated the triumphant story of how Christopher Columbus, as he set sail to discover the New World, crossed paths with a ship carrying Jews who had been expelled from Spain a day earlier by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Adding greater power to the myth, several orators claimed that the brief encounter occurred on the ninth day of the month of Av, a Jewish day of mourning that marked the destruction of the First and Second Temples and was traditionally regarded as the day the Messiah would be born.17 The myth that the expulsion from Spain had occurred on a single day, the Ninth of Av, an assertion that the historian Yitzhak Baer dismissed as merely a“fable," had been retold for centuries; the legend likely emerged in the immediate wake of the Expulsion.18 When American Jews repeated the tale and blended it with the story of Columbus, they created a myth of origin that wove together Jewish history and American history, providing a way for Jews to tell their own ethnic story, intimately tied to broader American cultural paradigms. Because of the symbolic power of Columbus, his image also provided a useful tool for Jewish critiques of American life. In the early 1890s, as more established members of the Jewish community founded the American Jewish Historical Society and prepared to place a Jewish stamp on the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage, many new immigrants from Eastern Europe demonstrated considerably less 63

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enthusiasm for the explorer. With no particular reference to or animus toward the historical Columbus, some new immigrants employed his figure to issue commentary on American and American Jewish culture. The prominent Hebrew and Yiddish author Gershon Rosenzweig, who immigrated to America in 1888 and often poked fun at the lowly state of American Jewish affairs, authored a scathing Talmudic parody, titled The Tractate "America," published in 1892 in the midst of the Columbus quadri centennial. In thefictionalTalmudic debate, Rosenzweig recorded the following rabbinic interpretation, explaining the origins of the country's name: Rabbi Scribner said: Through the astrological arts Columbus foresaw that America was destined to be a land of refuge for every scoundrel and empty-headed rake in the world, and he therefore asked mercy from God and prayed that the land not be called after him. And so, instead, they called it America—ama reikah, land of empty-headed rakes.19 Just as the play on words about the naming of the nation suggested disillusionment with American culture, so too did thefigureof Columbus serve as a device to express disappointment with the harsh conditions that new immigrants encountered in their adopted homeland. In afictionalautobiography published in 1894, an immigrant shoemaker who had come to the United States in order to improve his economic lot discovered that turn-of-the-century America offered only bleak living and working conditions. Lamenting his fate, he sarcastically inquires, "Who ever asked him, Columbus, to discover America? Why did he have to bring people there, promise them all sorts of fortunes?"20 The figure of Christopher Columbus became a convenient rhetorical tool, often employed by Jews to assail government practices. In 1909, when newly elected President Taft attempted to restrict immigration by denying entry to those who arrived with less than twentyfive dollars, the Yiddish press lampooned the policy by depicting Christopher Columbus being turned away at Ellis Island.21 Immigrant Jews frequently articulated their disillusionment with America by deriding Columbus. The popular Yiddish song "The Green Cousin" ("Di grine kuzine") closed with the biting imprecation "The hell with Columbus's country."22 64

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^

Figure 4. Der groyser kundes (The Big Stick), July 16,1909. In a biting satire of restrictive immigration policies, this cartoon depicts President William Taft and Ellis Island Commissioner William Williams demanding that Christopher Columbus prove that he had at least twenty-five dollars in order to gain admission to the United States. American Jews used thefigureof Columbus to highlight the hypocrisy of immigration laws. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. New immigrants did not attempt to overturn the myth of Columbus but instead used his legacy to put forward their own reading of Jewish life in America. The physician and journalist George Price praised the effort of Americans to "celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus" and“to demonstrate to the Old World what the New World has accomplished." Yet, giving voice to the sentiments of the working class, he insisted that the achievements of the United States should properly be attributed to the immigrants who built the nation.23 Columbus thus provided a vehicle for articulating varying Jewish interpretations of America. But despite the critiques leveled through this towering cultural icon, the dominant myth that positioned Jews as de facto discoverers of the nation endured as a central building block of American Jewish heritage until at least the 1950s.

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The attention given by Jews to America's "discoverer" represents only one example of the ways that American Jews located themselves at the beginning of their nation's history and insisted that they shared the nation's fundamental ideals. The founding myths of the United States made room for Jews to insert themselves as integral players in the creation of the nation. To be sure, when the Puritans declared America the New Israel, they envisioned no place for Jews. But Jewish rhetoric generally ignored the Christian triumphalism of the Puritans and focused instead on their devotion to Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, Jewish narratives regularly stressed the essential compatibility of biblical teachings and American democracy. Reform Jews were the first and most vociferous in insisting that the nation's spiritual and legal roots lay in the Hebrew Bible. As early as 1854, in the inaugural issue of the Israelite, Isaac Mayer Wise proclaimed that "the principles of the constitution of the United States are copied from the words of Moses and the Prophets."24 Although this rhetoric was most pervasive in Reform circles, rabbis from all three major denominations echoed the same themes. According to one Conservative rabbi, Puritanism "was, in essence, the rebirth of the Hebrew spirit in the Christian conscience."25 Even the president of the Orthodox Yeshiva University insisted that there was no "serious conflict between our spiritual heritage and the American way of life, which is itself rooted in Hebraic spiritual values."26 American Zionist leader Louis Brandeis often claimed that the Puritans' "constant study of the prophets" had profoundly shaped the nature of American culture, infusing it with a Jewish spirit. As one scholar has explained, "In a circuitous historical and conceptual journey, from prophecy through Puritanism, ancient Jewish ideals had become thoroughly Americanized."27 By insisting that American democracy, as Reform Jewish leader Kaufman Kohler proclaimed, "found its classical expression in Israel's holy writings," Jews claimed a founding role in the creation of the nation, not only placing themselves at the birth of the country but also taking credit for transmitting (from God) its fundamental principles.28 At stake in these "foundation myths," as one historian has called them, was an assertion about Jewish belonging in America.29 Just as the historical record of Columbus's Jewish compatriots establishes the claim that Jews were, literally, here from the beginning, the insistence 66

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on a shared spiritual heritage reminds Christian America that "our values" (rooted in the Bible) are identical to "your values" (of American liberty and democracy). The use of both history and myth allowed Jews to tell their own story about America, a story that placed Jewish contributions at the center. Thesefiliopietisticpronouncements were indeed self-serving, but they expressed an ideal vision of America that promised a secure place for Jews while also laying the groundwork for a harmonious relationship between Jews and Christians, rooted in their mutual devotion to Scripture. Thanksgiving Day was an especially popular occasion for promoting the shared biblical heritage of Christians and Jews. In the nineteenth century, when Thanksgiving was regularly celebrated in churches and synagogues, many Jews availed themselves of the chance to join "one day at least in the year in even religious communion with our fellowcitizens."30 Thanksgiving became a time for Jews to advertise their commonalities with other Americans and to stake a claim to a mutual metahistory rooted in the Bible. At special synagogue services, the singing of the national anthem and other patriotic hymns accompanied traditional psalms and prayers.31 Rabbis not only preached their own Thanksgiving sermons during these holiday services but often invited Christian clergy to speak from their pulpits in what became public performances of common ground. In 1879, for example, Henry Bellows, minister at New York's First Congregational Church, told the congregation gathered at Temple Emanu-El that "no people . . . has had a beginning or an early history, so like the Hebrews as the American people; and the old claim of being ‘a chosen people' has always been somewhat self-appropriated by our countrymen."32 Both Jewish and Christian clergy were fond of drawing parallels between ancient Hebrews and early Americans. A1915 American Jewish primer for teaching Bible stories compared Abraham's journey to Canaan with the voyage of the Pilgrims to the "new Canaan," explaining that both "left their homes to seek a new country, in which they could secure religious liberty."33 Another popular instruction manual for the celebration of Jewish holidays sounded the same theme: [t]he Pilgrim Fathers were greatly influenced by Jewish teachings in the Bible. We need but examine their first names—Gamaliel, 67

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Ezekiel, Samuel, and the like—to realize how deep this influence was. Many of the laws made by them, as well as the form of government planned, were inspired by the Torah, for they read and studied the Old Testament no less than the New Testament. They sang many of the Psalms on the first Thanksgiving. Jews may truly say, therefore, that they were represented, in spirit if not in body, on that memorable day.34 Such claims represent a cultural version of the mathematical principle of the transitive property of equality: if our texts were recited by the Pilgrims, then by extension, we were present at the foundational moment of the nation; we were virtual Pilgrims ourselves. One Jewish author even went so far as to argue the formula in reverse. Bestowing honorary Jewish status on the Puritans, a 1920s publication insisted that they so closely paralleled the Hebrews that"[c]ulturally they were Jews as much as non-Jews can possibly be."35 While they continued to draw links between themselves and the Puritans, Jews also adamantly insisted on the nonsectarian nature of the Thanksgiving holiday, that it was a coming together of a community rather than a worship of a specific God. As long as it remained religiously neutral, Jews could regard the holiday as sacred on their own terms, as an occasion to join equally in the celebration. Religious leaders often drew parallels with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which usually fell about a month before Thanksgiving on the calendar and could be regarded as a loosely similar celebration."[T]he idea of a harvest festival," explained one Jewish educator, "is not new to the Jewish people. . . . There is good reason to believe that the Puritans modeled Thanksgiving Day after the Jewish Festival of Succot."36 Extending the analogy with Sukkot, another text connected the origins of Thanksgiving, and the Jewish role in establishing its observance, to an earlier moment in America’s past. Lee Levinger s American Jewish history textbook asserted that Luis de Torres, Columbus's interpreter, had set foot in the New World on Hoshanah Rabba, the seventh day of Sukkot. He also claimed that De Torres had been the first to name the turkey, the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving celebration, calling it "tukki," the Hebrew term for peacock.37 Yet another Jewish textbook declared matterof-factly that "The Pilgrim Fathers, when they kept their first Thanksgiving Day in America, no doubt received the idea from their Hebrew 68

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bibles which they knew so well."38 This logic transformed Thanksgiving into an American holiday that had been essentially created by the Jews, affording Jewish culture a foundational role in the nation. Other attempts atfindinganalogies to Jewish tradition forged a link to Passover, a Jewish holiday that, like Thanksgiving, was centered in the home and revolved around a traditional meal. Some Zionists even connected Thanksgiving to the Jewish national effort, explaining that "when Jews are tilling the soil once again in Palestine, it is natural that on Thanksgiving Day we should compare the American pioneers with the HALUTZIM [pioneers] who are rebuilding the Jewish Homeland."39 The Jewish encounter with Thanksgiving required finding familiar terms to embrace the new holiday. Most Jews had never seen a turkey before arriving in the United States. In fact, the New York Times took note of the fact that on Thanksgiving Day in 1913, a group of immigrant Jews arriving at Ellis Island were treated to "their first glimpse of an American holiday and their first taste of the American turkey."40 In her memoir, social worker Elizabeth Stern recalls her immigrant father bringing home a turkey for the first time, which her mother compared to the more familiar duck or chicken traditionally eaten by Jews on holidays. Stern’s turn-of-the-century Jewish family celebrated Thanksgiving by setting the table with a white cloth and listening to her father recount lessons from the Talmud, creating a Jewish version of the newly discovered American holiday.41 Immigrant Jewish families gradually incorporated the Thanksgiving ritual into their regular observances and often drew parallels between themselves and the Pilgrims. Anzia Yezierska's 1923 semifictional "America and I" recounted her first encounter with the Thanksgiving story:"I began to read American history. I found from the first pages that America started with a band of Courageous Pilgrims. They had left their native country as I had left mine. They had crossed an unknown ocean and landed in an unknown country, as I." Despite the early frustrations and disappointments of immigrant life, Yezierska ultimately found seeds of hope in her adopted homeland: "it was the glory of America that it was not yetfinished.And I, the last comer, had her share to give, small or great, to the making of America, like those Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower."42 By envisioning themselves as latter-day Pilgrims, Jews found ways to assert insider status in American culture and imagined a nation in which they were full participants. 69

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Figure 5. Thanksgiving pageant at New York's Educational Alliance, early 1900s. Pageants like these, staged at Jewish institutions across the country, helped American Jews embrace American history in a Jewish context. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

But behind all thefloweryrhetoric that accompanied the celebration of Thanksgiving lay also a recurring Jewish critique of American government. Especially in the nineteenth century, government officials, including presidents and governors, often issued Thanksgiving proclamations that contained references to Christianity or calls to worship in churches. Year after year, Jews assailed this practice, even as they extolled the virtues of America. Speaking to his Philadelphia congregation in 1868, Rabbi Marcus Jastrow criticized the parochialism of Pennsylvania's governor: the Governor of the State has ignored the character of his office, and the character of the Constitution of the United States, by making his own particular belief the basis of a proclamation to the commonwealth, thus intimating that he wishes only such united with him in thanksgiving for the country's happiness and greatness, who may profess certain Dogmas similar to his own, 70

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and that he considers all other inhabitants under his jurisdiction unworthy to shout before their God, to serve Him with joy, to come before His presence with triumphal song, when the country celebrates a day of national importance.43 More than thirty-five years later, the American Israelite leveled the same charges. "The people know when Thanksgiving Day falls and what is the proper way of observing it," the newspaper told its readers. "The official proclamations are needless and smack too much of a union of Church and State to be to the Israelite's liking."44 Alongside all the rhetoric about the glories of America, these sharp critiques became standard fare at Thanksgiving, as Jews used the occasion not only to celebrate the nation with other Americans but also to define the parameters of the America they desired. For those Jews who dissented from both the Jewish and American majorities, Thanksgiving, like other national holidays, provided an opportunity to voice their opinions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish socialists regularly scoffed at the notion of giving thanks at a time when so many Americans endured poverty and poor working conditions. Almost every year, the Yiddish press published biting columns that attacked the hypocrisy surrounding Thanksgiving. Socialist newspapers regularly derided the "rich ladies" who descended one day a year "in magnificent chariots to impoverished quarters of town, their hands covering their noses from the stench."45 In 1902, a Thanksgiving Day article in the Jewish Daily Forward proclaimed that workers had little cause to celebrate this American holiday: Every Thanksgiving is a new reminder of that nefarious contradiction between what is said and what is done; it is a fresh reminder of how the American ideal of freedom is dead, and how equality is a hoax; how the happiness and the judiciousness of America is a lie and a swindle. The holiday of Thanksgiving is a holiday for contractors, manufacturers, bankers, and leeches. It is a holiday for all the people who are sucking this country dry. The masses, however, have nothing to do with this holiday. For the slaves of capital, today is not a day to give thanks. Rather, it is a day to curse society, the system, and the order which is choking the life out of this nation.46 7i

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Rejecting Thanksgiving became a symbol of engagement with the class struggle. By subverting the meaning of the holiday, refusing to succumb to bourgeois attempts to use it as "a means to compel workers into feeling a false sense of gratitude," Jewish socialists held themselves up as the true keepers of the nation's ideals, unlike the capitalists who had perverted the values of American freedom.47 The Jewish Daily Forward praised the holiday's original spirit, identifying the first Thanksgiving as a time when "the white immigrants and the red-skinned native Americans" secured a "contract of peace" to ensure that "immigrants and American-born natives [would be able] to live in America's vast, expansive land together—where there would always be enough for everyone to live contentedly." According to the Forward, only new immigrants remained faithful to the genuine intent of the Thanksgiving holiday: "for we immigrants, this tradition and the historical origins of the holiday are quite beautiful. Perhaps it is up to us to remind Americans of this."48 These bold assertions actually rendered Jews, at least those of the working class, the most faithful champions of the genuine American spirit, and it was left to them to remind other citizens, both Jewish and nonJewish, of the true principles of Thanksgiving. Some critiques of Thanksgiving offered more playful takes on the holiday. Eager to solicit business from people of all religious faiths, advertisers regularly marketed turkeys to Jewish customers, saturating the Yiddish press with campaigns that urged Jews to buy turkeys and join in the historic celebration. One 1937 Jewish Daily Forward article sarcastically poked fun at the pervasive advertisements and the notion that turkeys were part of Jewish tradition. Targeting a particular marketing campaign that enjoined Jews to continue the practices of their "sturdy, heroic grandfathers," the author cynically pointed out the advertisement's absurdity: "Right! Isn't it so that our grandfathers from Eastern Europe—with their beards and payes, yarmulkes and taleysim—our coughing grandfathers—isn't it so that they were rugged gunmen who ate turkeys they hunted themselves? This is called true Americanization!"49 Often, even the most lighthearted commentary on the holiday contained pointed messages. A Yiddish primer published by the Workmen's Circle in the 1950s, long after the height of political radicalism, contained a story entitled "Why We Eat Turkey on Thanksgiving." In the tale, a rooster, some hens, a goose, a duck, and a turkey all inhabit 72

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the yard of a group of American pioneers. The turkey alienates himself from the rest of the animals, insisting on his special status: "I am the only American here in this yard! The rest of you came from the other side of the sea. I am the only one who was born in America. Only I have the right to be here!" When the pioneers decide to celebrate the holiday with a feast, all of the animals offer themselves to be sacrificed in order to spare the lives of the others. The only exception is the turkey, who tells the pioneers, "Take all of them. Take them and roast them all. They are foreigners. I am the only real American." The pioneers ultimately choose the turkey for their feast, selecting the true American bird for their American holiday. In slaughtering the turkey, the character who professed a superior claim to American ancestry, this Yiddish story taught children about the evils of nativism and, by implication, the right of Jewish immigrants to a place within American society.50 While the most caustic interpretations of Thanksgiving emerged from the Yiddish socialist press, these newspapers often expressed a simultaneous appreciation of the comparative freedoms of American life. On Thanksgiving Day in 1916, as Europe was embroiled in World War I, the Jewish Daily Forward issued its usual proclamations about the deprivation of the masses, but acknowledged that "we must be grateful that our land is not bathed in blood." Pointing out the large number of European Jews caught in the crossfire, the paper went on to encourage Jews to heed President Woodrow Wilson's call for donations to aid the victims of war. By the 1930s, as European Jewry faced the menace of Nazism, the Yiddish press softened some of its more militant Thanksgiving Day critiques. By the late 1930s, newspaper articles continued to call attention to the inequality of wealth and privilege in the United States, but also described Thanksgiving as "a lovely holiday." "As Jews are pursued all over the world," a 1937 editorial observed, "we have nothing to grumble about with respect to America."51 Jewish socialists remained outspoken critics whenever they perceived injustice, whether political, social, or economic. But as the European Jewish situation deteriorated throughout the 1930s and 1940s, even radical Jews increasingly expressed their regard for and allegiance to the American nation. Thanksgiving, like other national holidays, afforded Jews and other ethnic groups the opportunity to reinvent themselves as Americans. The transformation, however, seldom involved wholesale assimilation 73

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or rote acceptance of dominant cultural narratives. Whether inserting themselves squarely within the prevailing framework of holiday observances as central players or offering counternarratives that challenged majority interpretations, American Jews adjusted the meanings of national celebrations in ways that highlighted their own history and contributions and gave voice to their particular concerns.

Liberty and Liberation According to Ben Edidin, author of a 1940 manual for Jewish holiday celebrations designed for club, school, and home use, America's Independence Day held special meaning for Jews. The Declaration of Independence, Edidin insisted, granted Jews unprecedented freedoms, and therefore they should celebrate as a sacred occasion the holiday that commemorated the document's adoption. Edidin argued that because America's founding paved the way for the liberties that Jews enjoyed, it should be regarded as analogous to the Jewish holiday of Passover. "On both festivals," he explained, "we celebrate the birth of a nation."52 Edidin was far from alone in comparing Passover and the Fourth of July as holidays of liberation; the analogy appeared across generations and from various corners of the American Jewish world. As early as 1858, the prominent Reform leader Isaac Mayer Wise declared that "next to the Passover feast the fourth ofJuly is the greatest, because it is a memorial of the triumph of liberty." Always a champion of the notion that the freedoms of the United States constituted a fulfillment of biblical principles, Wise referred to Independence Day as "the second redemption of mankind from the hands of their oppressors."53 Almost half a century later, the renowned Yiddish poet Eliakum Zunser echoed the association of Passover with Independence Day. For many years after his arrival in the 1880s, Zunser remained skeptical of the United States. Many of his poems gave voice to Jewish immigrant struggles and frustrations, and he feared his new country might yet succumb to the anti-Jewish prejudices he had known in Europe. But by the turn of the century, he became convinced that America was indeed different from other countries and capable of providing security and freedom for Jews. He urged fellow Jews to claim the Fourth of July 74

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as a second Passover and in the first decade of the twentieth century even composed a pageant that was performed in New York's Seward Park for the occasion. His pageant called on Jews to make the holiday their own: "Cast away the wanderer's staff! Lift your heads high! Sing the Song of the Fourth more lustily than others! The hearts that pined so long in darkness are more jubilant in the sunlight. See in the Fourth the end of your lamenting! After the years of tyranny and travail, this resplendent day is yours!"54 According to Zunser, because they had experienced oppression, Jews should be even more jubilant than others on the holiday that celebrated freedom. As we have seen before, Jews posited themselves as the true keepers of the American Dream and saw this American holiday through the prism of their people's long history. The coupling of Passover and Independence Day not only paralleled the liberation from Egyptian bondage with the freedoms Jews found in America but also provided an American Jewish narrative that allowed Jews to possess the holiday on their own terms. As a civic holiday, Independence Day presented an opportunity for Jews to observe an occasion together with Americans of other denominations. Devoid of any religious element, in theory if not always in practice, this holiday enabled Jews both to demonstrate solidarity with fellow Americans during a national celebration and to showcase their own contributions to the culture. In addressing the interdenominational gathering at the Bunker Hill Monument in 1935, Rabbi Morris Gutstein of Newport's Touro Synagogue insisted that the Declaration of Independence merited "inclusion in the great Literatures of Religion" and should be embraced by both Jews and Christians as, in his words,“the American Song of Redemption."55 As they often did, Jews emphasized their role as the People of the Book and portrayed themselves as ideological progenitors of American democracy. Standing on board the SS Leviathan, Rabbi Emanuel Hertz of Washington Heights described the nation's founders as setting out "with the Bible under their arm and the Declaration of Independence in their heart."56 In this formulation, as in so many others, the Jews, as creators of monotheism and transmitters of Old Testament values, became spiritual founders of the nation. These bold claims sometimes strayed beyond assertions of equality to suggest that Jews possessed primary responsibility for inventing American ideals. Such proclamations often contained mixed 75

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messages and conflicting motivations. At times, they revealed a bit of defensiveness, as though Jews were working too strenuously to prove their devotion to the nation. On other occasions, the boasts reflected genuine confidence, comfort, and ethnic pride. On Independence Day, American Jews continued the familiar practice of telling two parallel stories in their public celebrations, the first detailing Jewish contributions to American culture and the second tracing the longer arc of Jewish history. When they turned to the narration of Jewish history, American Jews took the opportunity to write a triumphant new ending to the story, culminating in the United States. On July 4,1918, both the American flag and the blue and whiteflagof Zionism adorned the streets outside the Stone Avenue Talmud Torah in Brownsville, New York. After a parade through the neighborhood, the schoolchildren staged a pageant in three acts: the first began with the Jews of Egypt being liberated by Moses; the next depicted the suffering of the Jews of Spain and Russia (conflating, quite egregiously, centuries of Jewish life into a single epoch of persecution); and the last culminated with immigrant Jews being welcomed to the shores of America.57 This drama, which notably begins in biblical times, brings Jewish history to a new climax on American soil. Independence Day, as represented in these celebrations, commemorated the freedoms granted both by Jews and to Jews. In a deft sleight of hand, Jews depicted themselves as both contributors to American culture, having gifted it with the Bible, and beneficiaries of it, receiving their gift back when, as European immigrants, they found in America a new haven and began there a new chapter in Jewish history. In sum, Jews were celebrating the freedoms they had helped to create in the first place. The logic behind such arguments may have been circular and convoluted at times, but it reflected the recasting of history, manylayered and at times quite sophisticated, that took place in even the simplest Fourth of July celebrations staged by Jewish communities across the United States. Not all Jews struck such a celebratory note on Independence Day. Fourth of July editorials in the socialist Jewish Daily Forward regularly scoffed at the notion that all Americans enjoyed equality and used the occasion to claim that only socialism reflected the true intent of the Declaration of Independence.58 The typical rhetorical formula employed 76

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by the Forward was to celebrate the vision promoted by America's founders and then to outline how those ideals had been betrayed. A representative editorial from 1902 pointed out that "American revolutionaries rejected kings, lords, and barons" and set out to build a society that abolished class divisions and replaced them with the principle of equality.“Presently, however," the Forward lamented,“America is divided between those who live as luxuriously as Europe's richest rulers and an unfortunate mass of enslaved workers who never know from where their next meal will come."59 The Yiddish press often peppered its critiques with allusions to biblical texts and traditions. One 1910 editorial from the Forward held that "the American Declaration of Independence is the world's first true declaration of freedom for an entire nation.... Can you find any 'Torah' as precious as this?"60 The editorial then proceeded to enumerate the many ways that America, through continued class oppression, had failed to live up to its founding principles. With more than a hint of sarcasm, readers are told that "to commemorate this precious 'Torah,' all Americans devote one holy day every year. How thoroughly suffused with the idea of freedom, equality, and justice the Americans must be [so we used to believe]! . . . But oh what a disappointment! The world's worst tyrants celebrate on the 4th of July . . . , the most merciless oppressors."61 Within the Jewish community, socialists generally leveled the sharpest critiques and were the least likely to paint the Jewish relationship to America as unequivocally harmonious. Still, almost without exception, the leftist Yiddish press lauded American ideals, using the holiday to demonstrate the ways that the nation had lost its way. For all its criticism, the socialist Yiddish press expressed a genuine reverence for the principles of freedom and democracy. While its assessments of American behavior could be especially harsh, they stood alongside notable pronouncements praising the nation and its institutions. On July 4,1900, the Jewish Daily Forward published a short story about an immigrant named Joseph Feldman who came to America alone and felt alienated and isolated in his adopted homeland. After coming upon a Yiddish translation of the Constitution, he was rejuvenated. "Joseph Feldman came to regard this small booklet as a little Torah . . . only after reading it was he able to grasp the nature of the land in which he had settled, the sort of rights with which this land endowed him, 77

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and the value these rights would have for Jews." In this unusually idealistic story, the protagonist began to carry the Constitution with him at all times, regarding it as a "holy book."62 The Forward also issued a particularly reverent Fourth of July editorial when the United States entered World War I: "The 4th ofJuly this year will be celebrated not only in America, but in England, France and Italy. Our American Independence Day has become a symbol for all the democratic lands in this war for national self-sufficiency and democracy."63 By the time Hitler took power, patriotic spirit infused the paper's coverage of Independence Day, depicting the Americans and the Nazis engaged in an ideological as well as a military struggle: Today, in one corner of the world, in Europe, Hitler stands with a sword in hand. In the other corner, in America, we stand with our torch of freedom. It is sword versus torch.... Whoever wishes to see the blessing of democracy and liberty, need not go far: he need only take a look at America, at America from coast to coast. Everything that America possesses, everything that America is, it has acquired through democracy and freedom.64 Even at the height of radicalism, the socialist Jewish press expressed a respect and appreciation for American ideals, a sentiment that, not surprisingly, grew even stronger as the situation in Europe deteriorated. During the opening decades of the twentieth century, Jewish socialists and progressive reformers often criticized Independence Day celebrations as dangerous and unruly, marked by firecrackers, guns, and mayhem. The Yiddish press frequently portrayed Fourth ofJuly festivities as raucous; one Jewish Daily Forward article cynically offered "advice on what the experienced man should do in order to avoid losing an eye on this wondrous holiday."65 While the Yiddish press issued sarcastic depictions ofJuly 4 bedlam, American reformers took up an organized campaign to clean up the celebrations. Between 1908 and 1916, the Safe and Sane Fourth of July movement promoted community festivals in cities across the country. These progressive-minded celebrations attempted to engineer and coordinate holiday events, offering safer, citysponsored fireworks displays, along with pageants, processions, music, and other entertainment. Reformers encouraged immigrants and ethnic groups to participate in the festivities, hoping to inspire patriotism 78

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and a sense of community. Historical processions with pageants and floats highlighting various ethnic groups and their national heroes became regular features of Fourth ofJuly celebrations. Jewish groups took part in these coordinated communal exercises but, like most other ethnic associations, also sponsored events in their own neighborhoods and under the auspices of their own institutions. In 1911, Chicago Jews joined in the official parade organized by the Sane Fourth movement but staged their own celebration at the Chicago Hebrew Institute. While Progressives tried to harness immigrant groups for patriotic celebrations, they rarely succeeded in homogenizing them.Jews continued to express patriotism on their own terms and to put forward their own readings of both Jewish heritage and American culture.66 Independence Day 1924 provides compelling evidence of the ways that Jews commandeered the holiday for their own purposes, using it to articulate their particular views on American society. In 1924, when the United States instituted its most restrictive immigration quotas, July 4 newspaper editorials across the ideological spectrum of the Jewish press issued bitter denunciations of the new policies and drew on the meaning of the holiday to condemn the direction their adopted homeland had taken. The Communist Freiheit (Freedom) published a vitriolic commentary that assailed the Fourth of July as "a holiday for the burial of ideals." The article began with a short history of the Declaration of Independence and proceeded to attack those Americans who had made a mockery of its principles. Calling the nation's leaders "oppressors," "bloodsuckers," and "leeches," the Communist paper insisted that the ideals that had inspired the country's founding had been buried "so deep in the earth that no resurrection will ever revive them."67 The liberal, more literary Yiddish daily Der Tog (The Day) showed greater restraint in its language, but no less disdain for the restrictionist climate that had overtaken the nation. Its editorial contained a stirring tribute to the ways that the United States had created a new definition of citizenship. By breaking with Old World notions that made race and ancestry the sole criteria for citizenship, the Day's editors argued, America had created a country in which principle alone ruled. In doing so, thefledglingnation had asserted not only political but also spiritual independence from its European predecessors. The article concluded with a quiet warning about the dangerous possibility that on this particular Fourth of July, 79

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America's commitment to independence and to a new national selfdefinition appeared increasingly precarious.68 In an article addressed to Uncle Sam by his adopted nephew ("a nephew by choice"), even the more conservative Orthodox newspaper Yidishes Tageblatt (Jewish Daily News) railed against America's anti-immigrant turn in 1924: We selected you, dear Uncle Sam, because we were tired of old world ideals, such as they were, of old world jealousies and hatreds, of the old world spirit of destruction. We came here because we felt that here under your guidance, there might be developed a new civilization based on the broadest humanity. Here there would be an end to the religious prejudices and racial animosities which have made of the old world a slaughterhouse. We gave more than lip-worship to you. We gave you ourselves and our children so that this country might live as an exemplar to the rest of mankind. Is our faith to prove an illusion? Are our hopes to be dashed to the ground, shattered beyond repair?69 While both tempers and fears were running particularly high during that year's Independence Day celebrations, the nature of Jewish public responses reflected an enduring pattern. Jewish celebrations of national holidays regularly contained references to Europe, measuring the progress of America (sometimes favorably, sometimes not so favorably) against an Old World precedent. Jews, like other immigrant groups, repeatedly gauged the mood of their adopted homeland in terms of their collective European experience and assessed the degree of improvement or regression. At the same time, Jews appeared in their own renditions of the American story as the most ardent believers in American principles, steadfastly clinging to those ideals even, as in 1924, when they claimed that the rest of the nation was steering off course. Across the religious, political, and ideological spectrum of the community, Jews used national holidays to project their own image of America and assert an idealized version of the Jewish role within it. Washington, Lincoln, and the Jews Historian Michael Kammen has observed that throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "George Washington and 80

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Abraham Lincoln remained the most sacred among a heavenly host of saints: the Peter and Paul of American patriotism."70 As these two figures became the cornerstone of the nation’s civil religion, American Jews, not surprisingly, made a concerted effort to lay claim to them. Through an intriguing mix of history and legend, American Jews reinvented Washington and Lincoln and brought them into the Jewish fold. The stories Jews told about George Washington often reverberated with tones of the sacred. A popular legend, with several variations, recounts the story of a Jewish soldier who serves alongside Washington in the Revolutionary War. Camped at Valley Forge in the middle of winter, Washington has become discouraged by the harsh conditions of war. Walking through the camp, he encounters a Jewish soldier lighting Hanukkah candles. The soldier explains to him the story of Judah Maccabee, and it inspires Washington, providing him with motivation and courage as he crosses the Delaware. Later, the first president sends the soldier a menorah as a gift, expressing his appreciation and respect for Judaism.71 In a different version of this story, the Jewish soldier at Valley Forge spies Washington kneeling in prayer and is inspired to light the last bit of candle he has left in observance of the first night of Hanukkah.72 Regardless of the variations, the tales about Washington and the unnamed Jewish soldier not only placed Jews at Washington's side in battle—just as other tales placed Jews beside Columbus—but also demonstrated a shared respect for religion, positioning Judaism alongside Christianity as one of the nation's faith traditions. A column in the Hartford Jewish Ledger argued that Jews had particular reason to celebrate as the country marked the bicentennial of George Washington's birth in 1932 because he "did more to set the course of America toward equality for all than any other American President."73 (Washington's birthday on February 22firstbecame a federal holiday in 1885. When Congress passed the Monday Holiday Law in 1968, the observance was moved to the third Monday in February.) In both public celebrations and private reminiscences, immigrant Jews venerated Washington as the symbol of American freedom. In her immigrant memoir, Mary Antin wrote adoringly of her first encounters with the legend of Washington. "I could not pronounce the name of George Washington without a pause," she recalled."Never had I prayed, never had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the 81

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Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child's story of the patriot."74 Even the leftist Yiddish press, which often used the first president's birthday as an opportunity to point out America's shortcomings, praised Washington's heroism. An editorial printed in the Jewish Daily Forward in 1902 narrated Washington's deeds in heroic terms, describing him as "America's most beautiful soul": Today, dear readers, is America's great national holiday. Today, our country celebrates the birthday of the man who freed it from the yoke of a foreign king; who helped it become a republic; who raised a flag of freedom for all types of people on this earth. In short, today is the great day when the men and women of the United States remember the noble, brave and courageous American patriot, George Washington.75 Through Washington, American Jews articulated the values that they wanted to be realized and preserved in the nation. The Forward reminded readers that Washington's key contribution was "his belief in tolerance for all people." But the newspaper expressed outrage toward those business owners and politicians who engaged in the "patriotic religion of worshiping idealized images of George Washington" while ignoring the fundamental tenets of democracy and equality that inspired the creation of the United States.76 Jews also worked to possess Washington's legacy by comparing his exploits to those of ancient Jewish heroes. As demonstrated in the tale of the Jewish soldier at Valley Forge, the most common figure associated with Washington was Judah Maccabee, who led the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV in the second century BCE. In American Jewish lore, Washington and Judah Maccabee were hailed as brave soldiers and national liberators. In the words of Ben Edidin, "Both headed small armies against a much stronger power, in the name of freedom and independence. Both were great generals who led their people to victory."77 Celebrations of Washington also drew occasional analogies to biblical figures, such as Joshua, Nehemiah, and Gideon—all of whom helped to capture or rebuild the Promised Land at different moments in Jewish history.

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The comparison of Washington with the Israelite judge Gideon, interestingly, extended beyond their roles in national liberation. In the Bible, the Israelites plead with Gideon to be their king, but he refuses to accept the crown, insisting that only God should rule them. One Jewish text pointed out that Washington demonstrated similar behavior: "When George Washington had won victory over the English army and established freedom for the American people, he refused to be made king and retired quietly to his home in Mount Vernon," setting America apart from European monarchies and following the example of Gideon.78 The comparisons between Washington and Jewish heroic figures implicitly suggested the parallels between ancient Israelite and American cultures, even as it allowed Jews to embrace the iconic Washington on their own terms. Jews, like many other immigrant groups, often claimed that they had deeper appreciation for national holidays and greater reverence for national heroes like Washington than native-born Americans. Noting that apathy pervaded many mainstream celebrations, Chicago's Sunday Jewish Courier insisted in 1914 that "Washington's Birthday, like every other holiday that reminds us of lofty ideals, is . . . chiefly a holiday for the immigrants, who still believe in those ideals and are ready to fight for them."79 Like other immigrants, Jews staked their claim to America by embracing its central heroes and elevating themselves as the guardians of their ideals. Jewish immigrants took possession of Washington's legacy, incorporating it within their own historical and cultural traditions. Alexander Harkavy, a lexicographer who compiled a comprehensive YiddishEnglish-Hebrew dictionary, also authored a Yiddish-language biography of George Washington. Harkavy portrayed him as a liberator who, by casting off British oppression, made it possible for later generations to find a haven in America. "Washington should be thanked not only by the underprivileged and oppressed people of the United States," Harkavy wrote, "but also by today's oppressed people of [many] lands who are present in this republic he built. It is a haven where people can attain freedom and the good life."80 Jews connected with Washington as a founder of the country that welcomed them to American shores. The prominent poet of the Jewish labor movement, Morris Rosenfeld,

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wrote a poem in Yiddish that extolled Washington's virtues while also positioning his deeds within Jewish narratives of liberation: He fought and ruled with full democracy. A friend to sons of Jewry, as though ’twer really he was freed from Egypt, he kept that memory and constructed for the world Jerusalem anew. Oh pure, untarnished soul we sing a song to you To you who had no equal our song of hope we raise, The Hudson roars your honor, all rivers join in praise, A beauteous silken banner isflownfor you in praise!81 Jewish tributes to the first president represented more than rote expressions of American patriotism. Rather, American Jews claimed Washington in Jewish terms. Many of the more daring renditions of the Jewish relationship to Washington described him as afigurewho fulfilled Judaism's ancient struggle toward freedom. George Washington was one of thefirstfiguresthat immigrant Jewish children encountered in their public school educations. In the metahistory that American Jews constructed to account for their own place in the United States, Washington claimed a similar position, providing a foundation story that cemented the relationship between Jews and the nation. At the Mount Vernon tree-planting ceremony in 1876, one of the key elements of the celebration was the public reading of correspondence between George Washington and several Jewish congregations, particularly his famous 1790 reply to the Newport community in which he assured Jews that the United States gave "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." In a pattern of self-definition typical within American Jewish culture, Jews themselves helped to author the guarantee that they held so sacred. It was Newport's Jews who first composed the felicitous phrases "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance" in their letter welcoming the president; Washington had then repeated these words verbatim in his reply.82 Washington had delivered similar assurances to many minority groups in America, as he calculated how best to balance group rights in the new nation.83 But American Jews turned Washington's words into a sacred founding charter of their rights as citizens in the United States—a charter they themselves had crafted. As time went on, American Jews treated 84

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Figure 6. An American Passover celebration, American Hebrew, April 19, 1889. This illustration depicted Passover observances in Jewish homes during the George Washington centennial in 1889. The portrait of the first president stands by the door to welcome the prophet Elijah and faces the image of Moses holding the Ten Commandments, symbolically connecting Jewish and American traditions.

Washington's pledge not only as a guarantee of their rights but also as a sacrosanct American Jewish text. American Jews unfailingly cited Washington's famous phrase, not only in 1876, but also when the nation celebrated the centennial of his inauguration in 1889, the bicentennial of his birth in 1932, and each year on his birthday. The observance of the 1889 centennial fell during Passover, and New York's chief rabbi, Jacob Joseph, composed a special prayer to be recited in synagogues that were decorated in red, white, and blue for the occasion. In New York, Jews who bought ten pounds of matzoh received a free picture of the first president with their purchase. The newspaper the American Hebrew marked the centennial by printing an Arthur Meyer illustration of that year's Passover observance in American Jewish homes (see figure 6). In the upper right-hand 85

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corner, an inset picture shows the lady of the house opening the door for the prophet Elijah, as a painting of George Washington looks on with apparent approval. Washington's face is turned toward a picture of Moses holding the Ten Commandments in the main image, symbolically linking the two icons who freed Jews from oppression.84 During the Washington bicentennial, Jews not only joined in the festivities but also took pride that a Jewish congressman, Sol Bloom, was directing this public American celebration. Bloom, who had worked in theater and real estate and had designed the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago World's Fair before becoming a congressman, set out to "bring George Washington to the people."85 Rather than holding a single event in one venue, Bloom encouraged each state to organize a multitude of celebrations. His intent was to have every community in the United States commemorate the occasion.86 The press regularly took note of the fact that the director of the bicentennial was Jewish, generally in favorable terms that positioned Jews, by virtue of Bloom, as central players in the national celebration. One reporter observed, "To no member of the Society of Mayflower Descendants, to no Boston Brahmin, to no Virginia aristocrat, to the occupant of no history chair at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, to no Son of the American Revolution or husband of a Militant Daughter, but to a man of alien race . . . [a Polish Jew ] . . . has come, by a strange turn of fate, the active directorship of the greatest patriotic show ever put on."87 The Jewish press chronicled Bloom's contributions to the national festivities, even as the community organized its own events.88 Rabbis throughout the country preached sermons to mark the occasion, and Bloom gathered their texts together with those of Christian clergy in a commemorative volume.89 And in a remarkable example of America as a new Jerusalem, the Jewish National Fund urged American Jews to celebrate the bicentennial by planting trees in the George Washington Forest in Palestine, newly created by the JNF as "a living memorial to George Washington."90 Throughout their celebrations of the first president, Jews took the opportunity not only to emphasize their enduring patriotism but also to quote repeatedly Washington's famous promise to them. The phrase "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance," became a collective mantra within the American Jewish community, summarizing the

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promise that Jews believed Washington had extended to them and encapsulating Jewish expectations of America. Nowhere has the Washington "guarantee" been more celebrated than in Newport, Rhode Island, where the local Jewish community takes particular pride in its role as recipient of Washington's letter. First only on special occasions, but then annually, after the Touro Synagogue was designated a national historic site in 1946, the Jews of Newport have sponsored a public reading of the exchange of letters.91 Each August for more than fifty years, Newport's Jewish community has rehearsed the words of Washington in an annual ritual, repeating and affirming America's promise of religious freedom and equality to Jews. Invited speakers each year relate the principles of Washington to the issues of the day; civil rights was a recurrent theme through the 1960s, giving way to an emphasis on diversity by the 1990s.92 Members of the community often dress in colonial costume as part of the performance. In 1990, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the letter, Jews joined with other Newport residents in a full-scale reenactment of Washington's first visit, with "George Washington" arriving in costume at the Touro Synagogue, where he was greeted by the rabbi and the congregation. On this occasion, the actor Ed Asner performed the reading of George Washington's reply to the Newport congregation, together with a descendant of Moses Seixas, who had penned the Jewish community's initial letter welcoming the first president.93 The annual letter reading has become a tourist attraction in recent years and also continues to serve an important public function for the Jews of Newport. It is a Jewish declaration about the promise of America, endorsed by the nation's first president, that the community seesfitto reiterate. Washington's letter itself was placed on the Freedom Train in 1947, a touring exhibit of documents and memorabilia relating to American history that traveled the United States for more than a year. Decorated in red, white, and blue, and designed to rekindle the spirit of citizenship after World War II, the seven-car train attracted more than three and a half million visitors as it made its way through 322 cities, demonstrating the virtues of democracy and liberty to the American public. Washington's letter was the only item explicitly relating to Jews in the collection.94

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Just as Jews sought to find their place in American history by laying claim to the legacy of George Washington, so too did they discover a kindred spirit in Abraham Lincoln. Since the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington fell in the same month, Jews, like other Americans, often celebrated the two together. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, for example, suggested in 1941 that Jews observe the joint holiday with a pageant staged in the temple. The organization even provided its member temples with a model script for the program. In it, the Statue of Liberty stands perched in the choir loft while the characters of Washington and Lincoln remind the audience of the freedoms they helped bring to America. The Statue of Liberty then welcomes a representative immigrant Jew to the United States, and he recites Elias Lieberman's poem "I Am an American."95 Such theatrical reenactments took place throughout the Jewish community from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, linking the nation's great presidents to the saga of Jewish immigration. One play performed in Jewish schools depicted Abraham Lincoln as afigurethat immigrants idolized from afar, even before coming to America. As two brothers talk aboard the ship that will carry them to United States, one says to the other, "Remember.. .how father used to read to us from his little book about Abraham Lincoln, till we got to think he must have been a king in America or something. He was just a poor boy like us, too, and as soon as I get to New York I'm going to start cutting wood and making speeches till I get to be president."96 The identification with Lincoln showed that Jews were patriotic Americans, even before their arrival, and also cemented the notion that Jewish immigrants belonged fully to American society. Another Jewish history pageant, staged by a Zionist organization in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1919, underscored the same theme, again positioning Abraham Lincoln beside the Statue of Liberty, extending an outstretched arm to immigrant Jews. Taking part in this particular pageant was Golda Meir, who as a young woman participated in one of the many celebrations that linked Jewish immigrants to American heroes and the American Dream.97 If George Washington represented the national liberator and the guarantor of religious freedom, Abraham Lincoln stood as the Great Emancipator. Likening his freeing of the slaves to the Exodus from Egypt, one manual for Jewish teachers recommended that instructors

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Figure 7. The Wanderer Finds Liberty in America, 1919. This Americanization

pageant, staged by a Zionist group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, depicted immigrant Jews being beckoned to their new Promised Land by the Statue of Liberty and welcomed by the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society (WHi-5348).

consciously draw a "parallel between the freeing of the Hebrews from Egyptian bondage and the emancipation of the Negroes," a formulation that once again linked the ancient Israelite past with American history.98 Jews were fond of comparing Lincoln to Moses. "Across the stretch of two worlds lit up by lesser lights, there are reflected those two perpetual flaming statues of Liberty—Moses and Lincoln," Rabbi Joseph Silverman told his congregation, forging an historical link between the two widely separatedfigures.Silverman insisted that Moses's message of freedom had been born in ancient Israel but had fully matured in the American context. "The sun of freedom that rose in the

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East 3,000 years ago," he explained, "has encircled the globe and set itself firmly upon the horizon of the West."99 Ben Edidin also saw a relationship between Lincoln and Moses: We like to think that he was inspired by the teachings of the Old Testament. For surely the family would not have named him Abraham if the Bible had not been a sacred book to them. Lincoln himself read and studied the Holy Scriptures many times, and he must have known well the story of the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt and how they freed themselves under the leadership of Moses.100 Through such rhetorical strategies, which were ubiquitous in the Jewish community, Jews not only linked Moses and Lincoln, biblical history and American history, but also used the celebration of Lincoln as emancipator to affirm their own freedoms in America. At the Lincoln centennial in 1909, the Chicago Hebrew Institute offered a prayer thanking God "for through this Thy servant Abraham Lincoln, we entered into fuller possession of liberty."101 Also popular was highlighting the correlation between the Abraham of the Bible and the sixteenth president of the United States. After Lincoln's assassination, Rabbi Samuel Adler eulogized the fallen president at New York's Temple Emanu-El, referring to him as "Father Abraham." "Even as God said to Abraham, the patriarch, that he was to be the father of many peoples," Adler told his congregation, "so did God select Abraham Lincoln to be the protector and father of a great people." More than sixty years later, a similar analogy—one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, drawn between the two men over the years—could be heard within the Jewish community. "Lincoln parallels the Abraham ofJewish record," Rabbi Alexander Lyons explained to members of his Brooklyn synagogue at the celebration of Presidents' Day in 1927. "Just as he who came from Ur of the Chaldees started upon his historic mission at the cost of great surrender and sacrifice . . . , so [too] with Lincoln."102 As with other American heroes, Jews attempted to bestow aJewish identity upon Abraham Lincoln, if not by ancestry, then by character. Rabbis, who were particularly fond of preaching about Lincoln from their pulpits, often claimed him as Jewish. As he mourned Lincoln's death with his congregation, Rabbi Benjamin Szold of Baltimore 90

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declared that while Lincoln was not "flesh of ourflesh,he was spirit of our spirit and essence of our essence. His soul and heart, his entire nature, . . . are all truly Judaic and in truly Jewish spirit." Using the same biblical quotation in his eulogy, Isaac Mayer Wise took the analogy even further: "Brethren, the lamented Abraham Lincoln believed himself to be bone from our bone and flesh from our flesh. He supposed himself to be a descendant of Hebrew parentage." To lend veracity to this striking (and unsubstantiated) claim, Wise added, "He said so in my presence."103 In addition to claiming Lincoln as their own, Jews were also eager to demonstrate that they, too, had been a part of Lincoln's historic mission. During the Lincoln sesquicentennial celebration, the Jewish fraternal organization B'nai B'rith mounted a special exhibition of documents and photographs "depicting the role that Jewish people played in Lincoln's personal and political life." A photograph of that exhibit adorned the cover of the organization's annual citizenship manual.104 B'nai B'rith's citizenship calendar also encouraged members to observe the birthdays of America's most heralded presidents by taking part in lodge and community-wide celebrations and by reading organization pamphlets such as "Washington, Lincoln and the Jews."105 Such publications, which circulated widely in American Jewish organizations, strategically connected Jews to the litany of national heroes, situated alongside the country's greatest leaders. Jewish socialists expressed particular reverence for Abraham Lincoln, regarding him as a "prophet" and "a great liberator, a true friend of justice and equality."106 More than any other American hero, Lincoln was embraced in radical Jewish circles. Yiddish schools nearly always celebrated his birthday, teaching children to revere the Great Emancipator. The final stanza of a poem in one popular Yiddish children's book contained a simple lesson about Lincoln: "And this is what Lincoln said / To everyone in his land: / The blacks must be free / In our beautiful country."107 In one of his Yiddish poems, Morris Rosenfeld described Lincoln as a champion of human rights who freed the nation's conscience.108 Certain Jewish socialists even went so far to claim that their esteem for Lincoln was more authentic than that of most Americans. "Here in America," the Jewish Daily Forward declared in 1907, "we socialists

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celebrate the birthday of the man who brought slavery in America to an end. American capitalists, in contrast, celebrate this day because the end of black slavery ushered in the new lucrative era of wage-slavery."109 As we have seen before, Jews often used American holidays and heroes as occasions to broadcast their superior devotion to American principles. In this case, Jewish socialists declared themselves the true followers of Lincoln's ideals, the ones carrying on his real legacy. But the strategy of asserting that they were the best Americans, the finest citizens, and the most loyal patriots remained a recurring motif in the narratives of American Jews of all political and religious persuasions— simultaneously revealing their insecurity about, and their confidence in, their American future. In a familiar pattern, the leftist Yiddish press commandeered Lincoln's birthday not only to express their regard for the sixteenth president but also to pursue their own social agendas. In order to celebrate the true spirit of Lincoln's birthday, a 1924 editorial concluded, "one must fight for the liberation of the oppressed as well as for the annihilation of every form of slavery. Especially the form of slavery most pertinent today: economic slavery."110 Jewish socialists regularly marshaled the figure of Lincoln as part of their political struggles. Jewish radicals joined in the vociferous protests that followed the execution of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927, and at a mass demonstration in New York, one speaker proclaimed, "Had Lincoln been alive today, he would not have allowed the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti."111 By invoking the great president, Jewish socialists positioned themselves as insiders in American culture, empowered to call attention to the injustices in their nation.

Forging an Ethnic America To be sure, Jewish writings, sermons, and celebrations of national heroes and holidays were frequently self-serving and self-congratulatory, and they often grew out of a perceived need to demonstrate national loyalty in the face of anti-Semitism. But they reflected other motivations and sentiments as well. Most American Jews genuinely considered the United States a nation that afforded them unprecedented freedom 92

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and opportunity; their expressions of patriotism and fealty to American ideals were sincere. At the same time, an element of defensiveness sometimes lay behind these fervent claims. Like other ethnic groups, Jews felt the need to prove their devotion to America, particularly when nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment were running high. But whatever their motivation (and usually there was more than one), Jews embraced America and made it their own by constructing a seamless merger between their history and American history, between their traditions and American values. This process allowed their particular ethnic culture to persist as they pursued their lives as Americans. Some historians have argued that participation by ethnic groups in national celebrations reflected not only the cultural hegemony of mainstream Protestant ideals but, even more pointedly, the ultimate ascendancy of patriotic and national symbols at the expense of minority group expressions. Such a paradigm suggests the gradual diminution of ethnic heritage over the course of the twentieth century, as nationalist frameworks came to dominate ethnic celebrations.112 It is certainly true that during the era of mass migration, progressives and reformers demonstrated a keen interest in exploiting national holidays in order to Americanize immigrants and used the occasions to instill patriotism and build a national consensus among ethnic newcomers. However, a closer look at these celebrations reveals a more complex landscape, in which ethnic heritage does not dim in a new land but simply finds alternate routes of expression. Like other ethnic groups, Jews pushed back against attempts to Americanize them by eradicating ethnic distinctiveness, and to do so often used precisely the American heroes and holidays that they were supposed to embrace. In 1909, Reform rabbi and communal leader Judah Magnes delivered a sermon on Lincoln's birthday chiding those who insisted that Americanization necessitated cultural homogeneity. Invoking Lincoln's legacy, Magnes claimed that for the Great Emancipator, "an American was a freeman, at liberty to develop his spirit as he chose, so long as he obeyed the law." Repeating the words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as a reproach to those who strove to erase ethnic identities, he insisted that "Americanization," when misused and misapplied, was "not conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are free and created equal."113 Holidays therefore offered Jews and other immigrant groups 93

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the opportunity to subvert coercive attempts at assimilation and to construct instead the vision of a multiethnic America. When they joined in national celebrations, Jews often participated quite consciously not as individuals but as members of a community and used the occasions to formulate and express an ethnic version of American heritage. For instance, in 1915, groups devoted to the Americanization of immigrants, such as the Committee for Immigrants in America and the League of Foreign Born Citizens, marshaled their energies to declare that year's Fourth of July as "Americanization Day." The outbreak of World War I combined with the presence of hundreds of thousands of newly arrived immigrants convinced many reformers that Independence Day presented a useful occasion to rally new immigrants in a united celebration of their new homeland and guide them toward good citizenship.114 But despite such calculated attempts to impose national allegiance on new immigrants and to indoctrinate them with American ideals, ethnic groups tended to deploy their own narrative strategies when they participated in such occasions. Their celebrations were replete with references to the glories of America, but they also positioned American patriotism within a broader historical framework that included particular ethnic experiences. Jewish celebrations certainly revealed a pervasive need to demonstrate national loyalty, yet they also testified to the ways that Jews construed the meanings of American citizenship. During Americanization Day on July 4, 1915, Jewish social worker and reformer Lillian Wald reminded immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement of the importance of their participation in the celebration. But she interpreted the holiday as more than simply the opportunity for Jews to prove their patriotism and become part of the nation. Rather, she placed the meaning of Independence Day in a Jewish context, explaining that the holiday resonated in the hearts and minds ofJewish immigrants "because there are so many among us who have known persecution and wrong, who have made great sacrifices for ideals, who have come to America believing that here could be realized our highest ideals."115 In this account, the United States remains the bastion of freedom that reformers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, intended to portray on this day. But for Jews, expressions of patriotism only made sense against the backdrop of a larger Jewish experience, shaped by a European past and a self-definition as immigrants. For all 94

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the Americanization efforts of reformers, ethnic celebrations suggest that Jews, like other new immigrants, seldom disentangled their loyalty to America from the longer historical understanding that informed their cultures. On the contrary, Jews worked throughout the years to incorporate their devotion to America within a distinctive ethnic narrative. This effort was not diminished, but actually heightened, during moments of national celebration. As one Chicago Jewish newspaper explained to its readers in 1918, the Fourth of July holiday offered "a most welcome opportunity . . . to display their patriotism for America," but nonetheless it remained imperative for the community to "celebrate this occasion as Jews."116 For Jews, national holidays became moments for expressing patriotic allegiance to their adopted homeland. Very often a certain defensive posture pervaded the occasions, as Jews worked to demonstrate that they were indeed loyal American citizens. But, in keeping with historian Mary Ryan's observation that the public has always been a "space where society's members . . . mounted debates rather than established consensus,"117 the patriotic expressions of American Jews suggest an even more complex process at work. Jews used national holidays not only to demonstrate their loyalty to American ideals but also to put forward their vision of American civil religion—one that made room for the inclusion of Jews within a largely Christian culture. These celebrations indeed became occasions for progressives and reformers to teach civic virtue to immigrant groups. But Jews, like other American minorities, also seized these moments to offer their particular perspectives on American civic ideals to the public. The messages articulated were hardly uniform or monolithic; during a single national holiday, a cacophony of Jewish voices could be heard, outlining a range of programs for both the Jewish and American people. National holidays provided an opportunity for Jewish groups not only to rehearse their own history but also to define their place in America, and often to define America itself. Against the backdrop of national celebrations, Jews sketched their collective self-portrait and created a space for themselves within America's evolving civic culture.

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ince the nation's founding, American Jews have made painstaking efforts to demonstrate their devotion to the United States, their loyalty as citizens, and their willingness to make the supreme sacrifice for the country in times of war. Like other minorities in the United States, Jews have found a particular need to underscore their military service as a way to prove the extent of their devotion to and belonging in America. David Lowenthal cogently observes that "Willingness to die for a collective cause is the supreme seal of national faith." Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jews joined in the chorus of ethnic minorities proclaiming that faith through the sacrifices of war.1 America's voluminous corpus of war films, war memoirs, and war histories testifies to the ways that documentation lends a heightened, and often more lasting, meaning to military service. In the impulse to record, Jews were no different from any other group. Historians have generally interpreted Jewish efforts to document and celebrate their military participation as a sign of defensiveness, motivated by a need either to prove loyalty in xenophobic times (as times of war often are) or to respond to anti-Semitic claims that Jews would not fight for their country. These unsettling fears certainly did lurk, subtly and sometimes not so subtly, behind Jewish expressions of patriotism. But the public, and frequently self-congratulatory, assertions of Jewish service constitute more than the defensive reactions of an immigrant group; they were also part of the construction of Jewish identity in America. Historian Michael Kammen has noted that "wars have played a fundamental 96

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role in stimulating, defining, justifying, periodizing, and eventually filtering American memories and traditions."2 So, too, for American Jews, chronicling participation in the military served as one of the building blocks of Jewish heritage in the United States. As they celebrated Jewish patriotism and valor, Jews crafted a public image of the Jewish American citizen, redefined Jewish masculinity (and sometimes femininity), created associations for war commemoration, and actively engaged in a process of self-conscious transformation. Across Europe, modern Jewish communities endured an endless series of local, national, and international wars. Generation after generation of European Jews shared a familiar experience: the accusation that they shirked military service. From East to West, ruling authorities questioned both Jewish fitness and the willingness of Jews to fight for the countries in which they lived. For centuries, Jews were considered "incapable of being soldiers because of their physical weakness, cowardice, religious fanaticism, and suspect loyalty." Not surprisingly, the question of whether Jews could, should, and did serve emerged regularly in the many European debates about Jewish emancipation and citizenship and became a convenient target for anti-Semites. In the Russian Empire, Tsar Nicholas I attempted to transform Jews, and indeed ultimately force conversion through conscription, believing that military service would remake the Jews of the East.3 During the emancipation debates in the West, such drastic measures were not imposed, but questions of legal toleration and citizenship brought to the forefront the issue of whether Jews would be willing to serve in the armies of their host countries and whether they could be successful soldiers. In the wake ofJewish emancipation in France, when Napoleon resurrected the institution of the Sanhedrin, the chief Jewish judicial and administrative body of ancient Jerusalem, one of the key questions that the emperor posed to the newly constructed assembly was whether Jews would be willing to fight for their country. The Assembly of Notables replied affirmatively, pointing to the sacrifices Jews had already made on behalf of France.4 The questions surrounding Jewish military service, which recurred constantly throughout modern times in Europe, encapsulated deepseated uncertainties about Jewish loyalty and about the fundamental nature of Jewish personality and behavior. Doubts about whether Jews 97

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could or would fulfill their duty as soldiers remained part of public debate for more than a century after Jewish emancipation, growing stronger with each outbreak of military conflict. During World War I, for example, German Jews mounted little effective opposition to the socalled Judenzählung, the census of Jewish soldiers ordered by the Prussian war ministry in 1916. The government ordered the survey supposedly to determine whether Jews were evading the draft and dodging frontline service but never released the results, leaving the lingering impression among Germans that the charges had merit.5 Such allegations both capitalized on and promoted a distrust of Jews and the belief that Jews would always be strangers and foreigners, even after emancipation. The notion ofJews as war dodgers, though often unsubstantiated, haunted European Jews throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and lingered in the consciousness of Jewish immigrants and on the agendas of Jewish organizations long after arrival in the United States. As we have seen already in other aspects of life, Jews in America never faced the potent anti-Semitism that they had encountered in Europe. The old specter of doubts about Jewish ability and readiness to serve in the military did sometimes emerge in the United States, but they never received any official government sanction or reached the pervasiveness or virulence of such attitudes in Europe. Just as Jews in this country knew that their religious expression was guaranteed and their rights of citizenship assured, so too they expected that the United States government (if not always their fellow citizens) would not openly question their willingness tofight.This altered the ways that Jews framed and defended their military contributions in the American context. Although responding to detractors remained constantly on the agenda, documenting and celebrating Jewish war service in the United States fulfilled another, and much greater, internal mission. In all their public discussions about participation in American wars, Jews repeatedly spoke of how they had been reinvented and reinvigorated as a result of their American citizenship and service to the country. The defensive posture never completely disappeared when Jews recounted their military accomplishments, but it blended with expressions of pride and with the assertion that war service had dramatically altered their very sense of self.

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The Transformations of War Embedded in the rhetoric about Jewish military contributions was a palpable desire to overcome the European past. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American Jews regularlyfilledtheir newspapers, speeches, and public ceremonies with declarations of how the United States had freed them to reach their full potential as citizens in ways that had been impossible in Europe. War service—lack of which had long been a stigma of inferiority for European Jews—emerged as the most powerful evidence of the possibilities inherent in immigration to America. The chance to fight became emblematic of the way that America had fundamentally refashioned Jewish opportunity, behavior, and even personality. When Jews talked about their renewed commitment to soldiering, they testified to their faith in America and in their ability to "assimilate" and become loyal citizens. There is ample evidence to suggest that non-Jewish Americans also wanted to be reassured that Jews in their country would differ from those in Europe. In 1904, a New York newspaper celebrated the 250th anniversary of Jewish settlement in the United States by praising American Jews for their transformation. "The American Jew," the paper noted, with the best of intentions, "is already a type clearly distinguishable from that of any of his European brethren."6 American Jews understood the need to demonstrate to their new country how they had "improved" on their former European incarnations. But by the turn of the twentieth century, these self-assured displays of Jewish military contributions also testified to another transformation in American Jewry: American Jews were beginning to feel superior to their European counterparts. Because of its symbolic value as the ultimate act of national loyalty, military service emerged as a useful prooftext both for the level of acceptance that Jews enjoyed in their adopted homeland and for the extent of Jewish self-transformation that had occurred in America. Realizing that transformation became an abiding concern within a Jewish community that remained deeply tied to Europe but was also determined to chart a new course. The dynamics of a perceived shift in Jewish identity from Europe to America lay beneath virtually every discussion about Jewish military contributions in the United States. War service became a primary 99

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means for Jews to demonstrate their newfound military prowess, purportedly fostered by the American environment, and to underscore the distance they had traveled from their European past. Jews participated in all of America's wars. Though no precise records exist, perhaps as many as one hundred Jews fought against the British during the Revolution, at a time when no more than twenty-five hundred Jews lived in the colonies altogether. Approximately eight to ten thousand Jews served in the military during the Civil War, and since the majority of America's Jews lived in the North and West when war broke out, most fought for the Union cause. Still, many Southern Jews retained great loyalty to the Confederacy, long after the war had ended.7 Due to the sharp rise in immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the number ofJews living in this country had increased dramatically by the time the United States entered World War I in 1917; thus, as many as 250,000 Jews participated in the Great War.8 Not surprisingly, World War II brought the greatest number of Jews yet into the military. By then, the total Jewish population was approachingfivemillion, and more than half a million served the country during the four-year conflict.9 As Jews narrated their own transformations in America, keeping careful count of the number of Jews in the military remained an abiding concern. But history sometimes proved more powerful than numbers when it came to Jewish participation in America's battles. When the SpanishAmerican War broke out in 1898, its particular historical circumstances inspired some of American Jewry's most potent war rhetoric, as pride in service to the American military mingled with revealing reflections on European Jewish experience. In 1930, an article in the Reform Advocate recalled the reasons that Jews had supported and served in America's war with Spain: When war was declared in the Congress of the United States against Spain, the Jews of this country were instantly aroused. The reasons ascribed for their interest were two-fold, war would give them an opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and loyalty to the country which had given them a home and a place of refuge; and they would take part in a war to help two oppressed nations, Cuba and Porto Rico [sic] in their struggle for liberty and independence, against the yoke of Spain. But back of the two 100

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obvious reasons there was a third one which was not openly admitted by the Jew, even to himself; namely a secret desire to avenge the thousands ofJewish martyrs who perished during the days of the inquisition. These three reasons, each of which was sufficient to stir the heart of every Jew, who was able to bear arms, and give his life in a conflict for his beloved United States and against his old foe, Spain. It enkindled a flame in the hearts of American Jewry which broke out into a conflagration. Three violent passions of the human heart were now at play in the soul of the American Jew: patriotism, love of liberty, and revenge.10 In this formulation, a patriotic Jewish community,fiercelyloyal to its adopted homeland, was also capable of throwing off (albeit metaphorically) its legacy of European oppression. According this scenario, the rein vigorated Jews of America emerged to vanquish the European past and to wield a power unknown to their ancestors. In this particular retelling ofJewish war service, that power had both physical and spiritual dimensions, reflecting both a newfound military prowess and, as the article stated, "the great change wrought in the soul of the Jew" upon becoming American.11 While this article appeared three decades after the war, even in the midst of the conflict American Jews expressed deep feelings about the opportunity it afforded them to triumph over an old European foe. In an 1898 newspaper article titled "The God of Israel Is Getting Even with Them," socialist journalist Abraham Cahan asserted that Jews wanted to fight in the war not only because they "consider [ed] themselves Americans and lov[ed] their adopted homeland" but also because they had "an old account to settle with the Spaniards." To explain America's role in the war, Cahan quoted a "patriarchal old tailor": They tortured the Jews and banished them from their land, and now the God of Israel is getting even with them.... He could have made some other power the messenger of Spain's ruin. Why, then, did it fall to the lot of the United States to settle her? . . . Who should avenge the blood of Israel? Russia, which is just as bad to the Jews as Spain was? Germany, Austria or any other country which is eaten up with anti-Semitism as a bad apple is with worms? England isn't a bad country, but what good does she do our people? The United States is the only land that has been a 101

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real mother to us. So God thought He might as well give the Americans the job. The friends of Israel getting square on His enemies, see? This story made America, the country that distinguished itself by welcoming Jews, an instrument of divine retribution and rendered the victory against Spain "as much of a triumph to the Jewish race as it is to the American people."12 The notion that Jewish participation in America's war with Spain served as collective reprisal for the Inquisition emerged as a pervasive sentiment, reverberating within different quarters of the American Jewish community. The theme echoed not only in the English-language press but also through the pages of the Yidishes Tageblatt, America’s first Yiddish daily, whose editor, Khasriel Sarasohn, posed a series of rhetorical questions to expound on the reasons why American Jews should rally behind the war effort: "Can they forget the martyrs of the Inquisition? Can they forget the rack, the wheel, the auto-da-fé, the stake and the flame? Can they forget the holy men and women, the flower of the race, who died with 'Shema Yisrael' [Hear, O Israel] on their lips? Can they forget those who died for God and Judaism? Can they forget the expulsion, when 80,000 perished in one day? No, no!"13 The Jewish meanings of the war effort even made their way into rabbinic sermons. Orthodox Rabbi Moshe Shimon Sivitz lauded Jewish support for the war. Giving thanks that Jews "dwell today in a land of freedom and liberty," Sivitz spoke of "how our sons appreciate and are grateful for the benefits they enjoy in this country, in that they go forth all of them by bands . . . against our enemies." Unsparing in his venom toward Spain, the rabbi extolled Jewish participation in the war against "the accursed Spaniards, who are red with the blood of our forefathers, and who in this generation continue too in the ways of their ancestors." As American Jews joined the battle, they helped to redeem "the voice of our fathers lying, quivering between life and death, beneath weapons of destruction in those cruel hands."14 In 1899, a year after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the theme of revenge against Spain again appeared in a Yiddish-language circular, issued by Jewish members of the New York Republican State Committee, urgingJewish immigrants to support Theodore Roosevelt's 102

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gubernatorial bid. The document reminded Jews that it had been Roosevelt who fulfilled the "long Jewish desire to see Spain fall" and vanquished the country that had betrayed its once loyal Jewish population by sending them "to the dungeons of the Inquisition and to the fires of the auto da fé."15 The handbill emphasized that many Jewish soldiers had served among Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and that he had supported and promoted them. The political campaign to get out the Jewish vote for Roosevelt pointedly invoked both the enduring memory of the Inquisition and the capacity of American Jews to write a new ending to that chapter in Jewish history: Spain now lies punished and beaten for all her sins. But the Party which brought Spain her defeat, and the man who fought against her, now stand before the citizens of this State and ask whether they are satisfied with their work.... Every vote for Roosevelt's opponent . . . is a vote for Spain.... Can any Jew afford to vote against Theodore Roosevelt and thereby express his disapproval of the war against Spain?16 The Yiddish circular revealed the profound meaning that Jews attached to their newfound strength, to the fact that, as Americans, they could marshal themselves to conquer an old enemy. Moreover, this particular example demonstrates the complex layers and purposes of American Jewish heritage. The power of historical consciousness resonates within this political campaign. Although Roosevelt certainly did not wage war in order to avenge Jews for a centuries-old crime committed against them, the Inquisition remained so potent in their minds that it could be wielded for political advantage. These Jewish Republicans were not only rehearsing Jewish history and adding a new American ending but also using that history to mobilize their ethnic constituency for political purposes. This invented narrative of the Spanish-American War told a Jewish story that simultaneously rallied Jews to express their rights as American citizens. In many of the narratives about Jewish military contributions, American Jews find themselves newly fit for combat, reclaiming their physical toughness in a land that offered them freedom and opportunity. The American Jewish Committee, which documented Jewish service during World War I and remained vigilant about any defamatory 103

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statements made about Jews, kept in its files an excerpt from the writings of U.S. Army Major LeRoy Eltinge, who asserted that Jews did not possess the physical or psychological makeup to be good soldiers. "[The Jew] has not been a soldier for over two thousand years," insisted Eltinge in his 1915 book The Psychology of War."For the same length of time he has preferred trading to doing work with the hands. The soldier's lot is hard physical work. This the Jew despises." According to the author, the Jew could become a successful soldier only if "the latent mainsprings of character that twenty-five hundred years ago made him a soldier to be respected" were somehow reawakened.17 According to many American Jews, that was precisely the transformation that had occurred. In a paper delivered before the American Jewish Historical Society in the 1920s, Lee Levinger, author of the earliest textbook of American Jewish history and a chaplain during World War I, assessed Jewish contributions during the war and claimed that the freedoms of America had gradually altered the disposition of Jews. "The Jewish immigrant," he insisted, "fleeing from a land of oppression to one of freedom, was in the vast majority of cases ready to break with his unwarlike tradition to defend his chosen country. The Americanborn Jew, product of American institutions, rose to their defense exactly like every other native American."18 Particularly striking in this statement is the way that Levinger seems to have internalized the stereotype that Jews, at least in their European incarnation, shunned military service. Many articles and reports that took note of the remaking of Jews in America likewise accepted this view of their European predecessors but held, as Levinger did, that the opportunities afforded to Jews in their new homeland, and consequently their deep loyalty to it, had resuscitated long-dorm ant Jewish military capacities and fundamentally altered Jewish behavior."In the land of the Czars," boasted one Jewish author,"[the Jew] made every effort to escape military service; in the new land he made every effort to give his very life in return for the privileges which he received." A young Jew enlisting in the SpanishAmerican War echoed those sentiments, explaining that "Russia never was the home of the Jews, while in America they were as good as the Gentiles, and that being an American [the Jew] must fight for his country."19 Roscoe S. Conkling's novel That Damn Jew described the specter of recent immigrants being called to service in World War I. Recalling 104

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the stories of the military that he heard at home, Conkling could only imagine, "my mother, my father, my grandfathers, my great grandfathers in Russia, running, hiding, always chased by the soldiers." Yet, suddenly in the United States, the Jew "was almost overnight transformed into a soldier and sent to the battlefields of a foreign land."20 But it was not simply Jewish behavior that had changed in America. In these narratives, the American Jew, or more accurately the American Jewish man, had been essentially transformed in the United States, reclaiming his masculinity. Within Jewish history, the "new man in the new land" trope has generally been posited as an element of the Zionist project. Zionist thinkers and pioneers asserted that the physical weakness associated with Jewish men in the Diaspora could be overcome only when Jews built their own civilization, in their own nation.21 In the United States, the notion of remaking the Jew never emerged with the frequency or the ideological potency that it had in the Zionist movement, yet, as we saw in previous chapters, it appeared with surprising regularity in American Jewish writings. Creating a new Jewish man in the United States involved both adopting the key traits of American manhood and reaching back in Jewish history for models of masculinity. In his analysis of Jews and World War I, Lee Levinger stressed the former, remarking that one positive outcome of the war had been its opportunity to provide a model of the "ideal of American manhood toward which we are constantly trying to train and urge our people."22 In their efforts to rehabilitate the image of Jewish men, other Jewish leaders linked the heroism of Jewish soldiers to the long tradition of Jewish bravery through the ages. Simon Wolf's The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen,

published in 1895 as a rebuttal of claims that Jews had shirked their duty during the Civil War, not only documented Jewish service during American wars but also connected their valor to the history of Jewish fighting men "from the earliest Biblical records, emblazoning the era of the Maccabees, signalizing the Roman period and illuminating the Dark Ages." Wolf, like so many other Jewish authors, peppered his description of Jewish soldiers with words like "bravery," "undaunted courage," and "faithful service"—characterizations that may well have been accurate but also reflected a conscious effort to paint a new portrait of American Jewish men.23 In 1932, an article in Collier's magazine 105

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portrayed Judah P. Benjamin, who served as the secretary of war and later secretary of state for the Confederacy, as "The Gallant Rebel," both brave and highly intelligent. "Not for Judah Benjamin the pliant knee and fawning eye," its author wrote.24 Similar language emerged surrounding Samuel Dreben, the highly decorated World War I soldier whose exploits were popularized by Damon Runyon, author of the short stories that inspired the musical Guys and Dolls. His tribute to Dreben,"The FightingJew," appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1922. In a poem that directly confronts existing prejudices against Jews and celebrates Dreben's heroism, Runyon writes: "[T]here's a heart beneath the medals / That beats loyal, brave and true ... He's a he-man out of Texas / And he's all man through and through. / That's Dreben / A Jew."25 The new American Jewish man that emerged in these portrayals had been remade by America's freedoms. He was not only physically strong and capable, unlike his European forebears, but also fiercely loyal to his adopted homeland and willing to defend it.

Documenting Jewish War Service While Jews consciously reconstructed their own image as part of an effort to reinvigorate Jewish life in a new land, some of the earliest accounts of Jews in the military were undeniably defensive responses to defamatory remarks. In 1891, one letter writer to the North American Review replied to an article about Jewish service during the Civil War with a claim that in his year and a half in the military, he had neither seen nor heard of a single Jewish soldier.26 Answering the challenge to produce some documentation of Jewish military contributions, Simon Wolf produced a treatise almost six hundred pages long that attempted to chronicle every Jewish soldier who had served the United States. Proceeding war by war from the time of the Revolution, cataloguing both officers and enlisted men, and documenting medals and distinguished service, the book represented a clear attempt to refute claims that Jews had not served their country. "This timely work on a timely topic," declared an advertisement for The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, "called forth by recent magazine discussions regarding the position of Jewish citizens as patriots and as soldiers, contains 106

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an alphabetical register and numerous detailed notices of American citizens of the Jewish faith who have been enrolled in the armies of the country from the earliest period of American history to the present time."27 Wolf, like other Jewish leaders at the turn of the century, felt a need to counter the anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant backlash that accompanied the mass arrival of East European Jews and became especially potent during the economic hardships of the 1890s. Moreover, like other Jews of his era, he couched his defense with an eye toward the longue durée ofJewish history, the current conditions facing Jews in Eastern Europe, and the faith in America as a land of freedom, opportunity, and tolerance. Observing that "the ghastly tragedy that marked in Spain the opening year of American discovery is being rehearsed in Russia with modern aggrandizement," Wolf concluded his book with a declaration ofJewish devotion to American ideals: "To no others of the Old World denizens was the New World more completely new: for no other people has the promise of the Columbian epoch been more completely fulfilled than for the Jews."28 For American Jews, the issue of military service was always bound up with the larger attempt to construct a new home and a new self-definition in the United States. As the cycle of defamatory accusations and defensive reactions recurred in subsequent generations, American Jewish organizations set out to collect information about Jewish military contributions systematically. During World War I, the American Jewish Committee, founded in 1906 to protect the interests of Jews worldwide, saw fit to establish an Office of Jewish War Records, whose mission was to provide evidence ofJewish military service. American Jews were certainly not alone in their desire to document war service; their coreligionists in many European countries engaged in similar efforts. Because accusations that Jews failed to do their duty as soldiers persisted so tenaciously throughout Europe, Jewish sociologists and organizations worked feverishly to collect statistics that would provide irrefutable proof ofJewish willingness to join the military, particularly during wartime. Providing evidence—counting each Jewish soldier and comparing the total number who served to the percentage of Jews in the general population— became a means to bolster Jewish pride as well as an effort to provide indisputable confirmation that Jews were indeed loyal citizens, willing 107

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to fight to protect the nation. Simon Wolf's influential study, a large portion of which consists simply of lists of Jewish soldiers who served in various wars, represents precisely this sort of endeavor. His amateur efforts were followed in subsequent generations by more scientific attempts to gather statistics. When the United States entered World War I, the American Jewish Committee's Office of Jewish War Records determined not to leave it to historians to document Jewish war service. "[T]his time," the Committee declared, "no effort should be spared to preserve in permanent and authentic form the full story of Jewish service and sacrifice."29 The desire to keep a record of Jewish war service had a long history, but when the United States entered World War I, the Jewish community was both larger and better organized than it had been during previous wars, and more capable of carrying out a thorough statistical analysis of the community's efforts. Moreover, Jews may have felt a particular need to document their commitment to the war effort because the Jewish community had been deeply divided about supporting military intervention before the United States officially joined the conflict. When fighting first erupted in Europe, American Jewry's most prominent leaders expressed a range of opinions about the war. Most of the Jewish Left, including the leading figures in the Jewish labor movement and Jewish Daily Forward editor Abraham Cahan, vocally opposed the war; their dissent was echoed by pacifists and antiwar activists such as Judah Magnes and Lillian Wald. For immigrant Jews, resistance to the war had less to do with a particular stance toward United States policy than it did with the abiding concern for the situation in Russia. Antipathy toward the tsarist government, fed by lingering memories of anti-Jewish policies, led many East European immigrants to support Germany's bid to defeat Russia. While some Jews opposed war in principle, most Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe simply could not conceive of siding with the Russian forces that continued to persecute Jews. At the same time, Jews of German descent, such as prominent communal leader Jacob Schiff, found themselves deeply torn by the war. Schiff retained a profound loyalty to Germany and to his own German heritage. In the early years of the war, he expressed hopes for a speedy resolution to the conflict and insisted that the United States had little to gain by joining the fight. But by 1917, with 108

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the continued increase in German military aggression, Schiff reversed his position and came to support American entry into World War I.30 By this time, the Jewish community's most prominent leaders, including Cyrus Adler and Louis Marshall, along with organizations as diverse as the American Jewish Committee, the Hebrew Educational Alliance, and the Orthodox Yiddish press, all supported American intervention in the conflict. With the fall of the tsar in 1917, the tide turned for most American Jews. They could now more comfortably side with the Allies and rally behind the war effort.31 For the three years that the United States maintained a policy of neutrality toward the war, Jews aired their differing opinions in dueling speeches and in the press, but once America entered the conflict, even most of the strident opponents conceded the issue. "As if by magic," declared an article in the Jewish Daily Forward, "the debates and discussions on the Jewish street about whom the Jews should sympathize with in the present war have disappeared. There is nothing more to discuss."32 The Yidishes Tageblatt assuredly proclaimed that "If anyone ever thought that there was a Jew in America who was pro-German, then he has made the greatest mistake possible.... The Jews were antitsarist, but never pro-German."33 After the United States was embroiled in the conflict, only a few pacifists within the Jewish community held out opposition. Most Jews shared the sentiments of the widely readJewish Daily Forward, which changed its mind after 1917 and enjoined its primarily immigrant readers not to "give anyone occasion to doubt that the interests of this country are not our interests, that the good name of this country is not dear to us. Let us act as natives, not as foreigners."34 When the United States joined the conflict, the American Jewish Committee initiated a comprehensive project to count every Jewish soldier serving in the war and blanketed communities across the country with information about its ambitious survey. Because the military never tabulated the religious or ethnic affiliation of servicemen, the Jewish community had to gather the information on its own. Publicizing the effort in synagogues, fraternal organizations, colleges, public and parochial schools, and the Jewish press, the Committee's Office ofJewish War Records distributed thousands of "war record cards" through every possible venue.35 Most Jews seemed eager to participate in the 109

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survey, writing letters to the Committee and requesting additional cards to distribute. One young man sent in two cards on behalf of his friends at the front and requested a batch of cards to take with him, as he and his two brothers shipped out for Europe.36 Requests and completed cards came in from individuals, communities, and organizations across the country, suggesting that many Jews shared the desire to record their military participation. However, not all Jews greeted the survey with such enthusiasm. "I entirely resent this movement to separate the soldiers of the Jewish faith as in any way differing from any other American," wrote one Jewish soldier. Another man who received a standard form letter from the Committee soliciting information, returned the letter with the words "in error" written in large red letters. One Committee staff member noted on the returned letter that this particular man was known to one worker in the office and was indeed Jewish, but obviously did not want to be counted as such.37 Julian Leavitt, director of the project, responded to each of these letters, explaining to the dissenters: "You have completely misunderstood the spirit and purpose of our work. It is not an attempt at self-glorification, but an authentic record of Jewish service, which has served, and will serve for a generation to come, as an effective answer to those who could deny the value of the Jewish contribution to American civilization."38 Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, echoed those sentiments, underscoring that his "abhorrence of separatism" was "the very reason that I deem it important, in order to counteract misconceptions on the part of the American public, that it should be known to what extent the Jews regard themselves as an integral part of the American people and are rendering service in this great emergency." Marshall's further elaboration indicated his profound desire to respond to potential detractors: Unfortunately, the idea prevails in many quarters, that the Jew is disposed to be a slacker and that he is not doing his full duty. There have been covert allusions, and in many instances outspoken statements, to that effect in the press, it is whispered in the street, it is the subject of brutal witticisms.... It is to counteract that tendency and to show that the Jews of America are not only doing their full duty but in reality are furnishing more than their numerical percentage to the army and navy, that I am anxious to present accurate no

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statistical information.... My sole desire is to prove to the American people that, taking all elements into consideration, no part of our population is more loyal and more patriotic than the Jews.39 Despite the objections that this calculation of Jewish servicemen only furthered the isolation of Jews, the Committee considered its work an important expression of communal pride and a defense against antiJewish prejudice. Staff members privately resented those Jews who refused to be counted in the survey and maintained a special file for the letters returned in protest, labeling it"Maranhos" (sic)—a term for Jews who practiced their Judaism in secret after converting to Christianity during the Inquisition. The reference suggested that those who refused to participate in the survey were consciously attempting to hide their Jewish identity, and reflected the disdain they elicited among the Committee's staff. In the three years that it functioned, the Committee's Office of Jewish War Records worked feverishly to document every Jewish soldier who served and highlight the accomplishments of those who received honors or commendations for their service.40 Its final report, issued in the fall of 1919, concluded that 150,000 Jews participated in the war and 2,200 lost their lives in the conflict. Important for its particular mission, the office calculated that although Jews represented only 3 percent of the American population, they comprised approximately 4 percent of the military during the war.41 (Later estimates counted about 250,000 Jews in the service—about 5 percent of all those in the armed forces.)42 The American Jewish Committee proudly boasted that Jews had served their nation "a generous margin beyond their quota" and had "enlisted cheerfully, fought gallantly and died bravely for the United States."43 Throughout the survey process, the Committee repeatedly stated its intention to provide an accurate historical record in order to respond to potential detractors, yet its language also suggests obvious stirrings of ethnic pride and a quest for communal self-definition. Just as in their celebrations of national holidays, Jews used calculations about war service as part of an internal mission, a means to bolster their community's self-respect as well as to showcase their patriotism to other Americans. Here, too, the slight air of superiority in the broadcast of their findings reveals a sense of confidence and belonging in the United States and a in

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belief that Jews represented the ideal American citizens, even as it also powerfully suggests a lingering insecurity. While the Office of War Records, created specifically to document military service during World War I, existed for only a few years, the Jewish War Veterans (JWV), founded in 1896, endured as the leading representative of Jews in the military. One of the many organizations that emerged on the Jewish associational landscape, the JWV invited any Jew who had served in active duty to join its ranks. As it developed, the JWV maintained a national office, with local "posts" in cities across the country. While the organization engaged in a range of activities— commemorating war service, taking responsibility for Jewish military funerals, arranging parades on Memorial Day, as well as holding regular meetings and sponsoring social activities—the JWV also documented Jewish service in every American war. One particular graphic, complete with portraits of "representative" Jewish soldiers from each American war, relevant statistics about aggregate Jewish participation, and citations of individual Jewish heroism, appeared regularly in the JWV journal (see figure 8). Used whenever the organization wanted to underscore the long history of Jewish military service, this frequently republished document informed readers that "the Jew has done his share in the American armed forces from its inception." In many respects, the soldiers depicted in the illustration painted a desired collective self-portrait. Exhibiting "coolness, courage and daring," proving "second to none but superior to many," the Jewish soldier emerged as an icon of Jewish communal aspirations.44 Even in later years, when Jews had become far more secure in the United States and when the majority of American Jews were nativeborn, Jews continued to make an effort to document their war service. During World War II, more than half a million Jews served in the armed forces, and the organized Jewish community again undertook a systematic campaign to count them. This time the National Jewish Welfare Board's Bureau of War Records sponsored the effort, culling available records and establishing local committees in cities across the country. At the conclusion of the war, the organization published a two-volume study that again consisted of state-by-state lists of Jewish soldiers, along with medals awarded, casualties incurred, as well as a host of other detailed information.45 112

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impktc •*11t"t'T of number nf Jew* who [«Kbt, Dttl -y rceurdi «vrrral pmnirKni names: Col, ^f^ltha^ Mrycrs. r*pt. il*ver Mosesr Adji. livac ifjci-*. Sampd N'tmis, KenjjjMjti tints, frvid Mfizkr h and 5ast but not least Judali TunTOL ' O H bttHditifc nf TtnnLrr I [aPF ^lonmiwnl w>11 Trade pwiiole bv the [itlen donBtmn nE Jlu.DflO.On lemnt in prcctim.

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il during the W«»r]d War. Thii w u alnu» S% f forces of Ihc U. S. A. whrrras J^WJ form but .I'.! .'I thr [H^iiblfDlL Of ihHK ill thr «rtdw, 2&?fc W cn VtV I M F K R S No ]e« Uun 1100 d u i m for nldr ^tre •wwded m |TW*. 0^ nScTOCo^rewteM] M«W* oE Honor :i Mnlfi I. Jta-trcffinftrrnl nut Jrwi. Then WTTC about Ifi/N'f J^H^K Ccmimistmnfll Officers b «rvicc, Jrwi k w n 1-1.000. ol wliich n n iluti Z.SOQ m V I I K ifi

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Figure 8. The Jew in America's Wars, The Jewish Veteran, August 1935. The Jewish War Veterans regularly reproduced this image to document Jewish service in American wars. Courtesy of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA.

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In the context of 1940s America, the director of the Bureau of War Records, Samuel Kohs, couched the need for a systematic study ofJewish war service in scientific terms and in the interests of both the Jewish people and the nation. Kohs stressed that all minority groups, not only Jews, could be vulnerable to unfounded charges. "Unless each minority group is prepared with facts and figures to answer these innuendos and groundless accusations," he explained, "it places itself in an extremely weak position in relation to the majority group."46 Kohs further maintained that the Jewish community should gather such information to gain a better understanding of its "own group needs and own group purposes," the notion being that self-study would enable Jewish organizations to meet the needs of its constituency more effectively. The knowledge obtained would not only benefit Jews, he claimed, but also contribute to "the unity of our American people through understanding based on facts, rather than misunderstanding based on myths, rumors, and falsehoods."47 By the World War II era, the tenor of discussion surrounding the survey of Jewish war service had changed somewhat and was now informed by the rhetoric of scientific data analysis, but the motivations for it continued to contain a measure of defensiveness as well as an internal mission.

Narrating Jewish Heroism The rehearsal of military contributions became part of conventional discourse within the Jewish community, and by the end of World War I, if not before, had emerged as a standard element in popular narratives of American Jewish history. A litany of Jewish military service to the United States appeared regularly in the earliest accounts of American Jewish history, and virtually every survey of Jewish history began with a detailed description of Jewish participation in the Revolutionary War. The authors of popular Jewish texts displayed an abiding concern, as we have already seen, with demonstrating that Jews both fought for the nation's independence and contributed to its founding ideals. "The Patriot cause had its Jewish advocates everywhere," declared a 1931 publication.48 Most narratives contained accounts ofJews who aided the Revolutionary cause in a variety of ways, including ubiquitous references to 114

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the broker and financier Haym Salomon (discussed in further detail in chapter 5). One textbook emphasized the many different contributions that Jews made to the war effort: "The Founding Fathers did not fail to recognize how vital the assistance of the Jews was infinancingthe war, in supplying the armed forces with ammunition, blankets, provisions, and in maintaining a messenger service between George Washington's headquarters and the various cities." Providing as much detail as possible, the author described how the "well-known Minis family of Savannah gave men and money to the republican cause, and their women persisted in bringing food to American prisoners until the British drove them out of their homes."49 Chronicling the deeds ofJewish soldiers in the Revolution became a staple in American Jewish historical writing. In 1895, Simon Wolf named forty Jews who served in the Revolution, and his account became a primary source for most later texts.50 The list included Isaac Franks, David Salisbury Franks, Solomon Bush, Benjamin Nones, Mordecai Sheftall, and the Pinto brothers, just to name a few. Peter Wiernik, who in 1912 authored one of the first scholarly treatments of American Jewish history, detailed the activities of many of those soldiers, specifying their contributions in battle and the honors they received. Unlike most other histories of the period, Wiernik's account was not celebratory in tone. Yet he did point out that although in most colonies "Jews were then still barred from elective office by the clauses in the charters and restrictive laws ... this did not prevent them from participating in the work of liberating the country."51 Unlike Wolf and Wiernik's sober presentations, most popular narratives, particularly those written for children, tended to dramatize the historical record. The many stories about Isaac Franks, who served alongside George Washington in the Revolutionary War, typify the general tenor of tales of Jewish military service. Elma Ehrlich Levinger, a popular author of Jewish children's books, depicted a young and determined Isaac Franks. When confronted by fellow soldiers who doubted his ability tofightbecause he was a Jew, he vowed to prove them wrong. Levinger made a point to portray military prowess as an integral part of Jewish history through the ages. In her story, Franks sets out to prove to his detractors "that the descendants of David and the Maccabees were soldiers worthy of their ancestors." She also wanted to remind 115

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her young readers that Jewish identity reinforced American patriotism, so she put that sentiment in the mouth of George Washington, who praises the young Isaac Franks after he proves himself in battle. "A boy who is as loyal a Jew as you," Washington tells Franks, "must be a loyal American."52 These stories paint a portrait of courageous and patriotic Jews who remained devoted to their faith as they participated in the pivotal battles that founded the nation. This dual commitment to country and religion emerged time and again in Jewish narratives, testimony to the abiding concern with preserving Jewish identity in an open society, a concern that endured even as Jews remained preoccupied with belonging in America. Edith Calisch's 1930 play The Jews Who Stood by Washington strikes a similar chord, as Franks explains to Washington that his experience as a Jew motivates his commitment to the Revolutionary cause: "I am a Jew, sir, and above all, a lover of peace. But for many generations we Jews have struggled against those who would take our homes and possessions from us, and here in America we have at last found refuge. We can not [sic] sit idly by and see our liberty torn from us, and we will not let a British tyrant make slaves of those who have given us freedom from tyranny."53 In this very common explication, it is their history of oppression that renders Jews particularly willing to fight for liberty. Accounts of Jewish Revolutionary exploits consistently stressed that while their past made Jews especially determined to create a free nation, they stood together with other soldiers engaged in the struggle and laid equal claim to the nation's origins. When Calisch recounted the deeds of Mordecai Sheftall, a Jewish soldier who fought in Savannah, Georgia, she portrayed him as proud and defiant in the face of those who challenge his patriotism. In the play, Sheftall responds eloquently to charges that as a Jew, he cannot be trusted and is a traitor to the cause. "I am a Jew by religion and ancestry," he tells his detractors, "but I am also an American, born on American soil, and loving American liberty better than life itself."54 In the 1916 Yiddish textbook Fun Idishen kval (From a Jewish Spring), which covered a wide spectrum of Jewish literature and history, authors Joel Entin and Leon Elbe purposefully included a section about Jewish soldiers who fought in the American Revolution, documenting the contributions of Isaac Franks, David Salisbury Franks, Benjamin Nones, and Mordecai Sheftall. After recounting the heroic deeds of these men, the authors explained, 116

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"And thus have we seen how our ancestors fought side by side with their American brothers, and how, together, they spilled their blood for our freedom." The lesson that emerged from this history was clear:"The Jews are not foreigners in America. With their blood and possessions they helped to liberate this land and make it thrive."55 Service in the Revolutionary War connected Jews firmly to the nation's origins, but popular narratives also detailed Jewish contributions to subsequent wars. Lee Levinger's influential textbook, first published in 1930 and issued in revised editions through the 1950s, detailed Jewish service not only during the Revolution but in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and in later editions, World War II. Levinger, who served as a military chaplain in the First World War, was particularly eager to demonstrate that "Jewish soldiers were loyal, courageous, and reliable in the great emergency," but also that they were "typical American soldier[s]," demonstrating patriotism and heroism equal to that of other American fighters.56 In many accounts, war service was depicted as a crucible that transformed Jewish immigrants. One popular text in American Jewish history told the story of Abe Krotoshinsky, who received the Distinguished Service Cross for his role in helping secure the rescue of the Lost Battalion in World War I. In American Promise, Sulamith Ish Kishor explained how "Abe Krotoshinsky of the Bronx, an immigrant alien," a "thin, shy youngster with staring blue eyes and a shuffling walk—the last person you'd think of as a war hero," executed the daring rescue. "Little, pale, skinny Abe of the Bronx led a squad of Americans back into the forest, and saved two hundred and fifty-two soldiers."57 By stressing the physical characteristics so often associated with Jewish immigrants, Ish Kishor implied that Jews possessed patriotism and heroic spirit that transcended their bodies, even as she suggested the fundamental change in Jews produced by service in the military. American Jews continued to respond to detractors who doubted their military prowess and willingness to serve. Interestingly, several prominent non-Jews joined in the campaign, writing their own treatises on Jewish wartime contributions. Madison Peters, a New York minister who authored several volumes about Jewish patriotism, described in great detail the heroism of those Jews who served in the Revolutionary War and praised Jewish devotion to the nation through 117

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the centuries. "I have recited these instances of the Jew's loyalty," he explained in 1915,'to show that he is not a parasite, not an exploiter, not a new comer [sic], but an American of the Americans.... The American flag is his. America is as much a Jewish as a Christian country."58 The liberal Christian defense of Jewish patriotism resulted in celebratory accounts of Jewish war service, especially useful in times of political backlash against Jews and other immigrants. In 1924, as anti-immigrant sentiment escalated in America and Congress legislated the most restrictive immigration quotas the country had ever known, Samuel McCall, who had served in Congress and as governor of Massachusetts, published a discourse of almost three hundred pages titled Patriotism of the American Jew. Chronicling Jewish loyalty to America from the colonial period through the First World War, the book offered an exhaustive survey of Jewish military contributions. McCall explicitly stated that he intended his study to refute "the accusation that the Jew can be true to no country and is lacking in the capacity for patriotism."59 His conclusions cast American Jews in the most favorable light: So far as the Jews are concerned they played a most important part in the discovery of this continent. They were honorably associated with our colonial development. Although few in number, they helped mightily to finance the Revolution; and they bore a brave part under Washington in arms. They have gained honorable distinction in every war in which the country has been engaged. In World War devotion they made a noble record, and established beyond all question their title to be known as patriotic Americans.60 Intended as a rebuke to the prejudice of nativists, McCall s enthusiastic advocacy of Jewish patriotism echoed the celebratory accounts produced by Jews themselves. American Jews, not surprisingly, quoted liberally from Christian defenses of Jewish military service, employing them regularly to bolster their own claims. By World War II, Jews began publishing their own book-length expositions chronicling Jewish participation in American wars. J. George Fredman and Louis Falk's Jews in American Wars, published by the Jewish War Veterans, proceeded war by war, detailing Jewish involvement 118

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in every American military conflict. "The military contribution of Jews to the up-building of our nation is too little known," explained the authors, "and we believe it important at this time to retell the story of the patriotism of the Jews, not to impress our fellow Americans with the virtues of Jews, but because the facts of American history are the best answer to the libels which endanger the unity of our country."61 A defensive posture also pervaded Mac Davis's Jews Fight Too!, a more narrative account of Jewish war service that offered stories of individual heroism. Published in 1945, the majority of the book dealt with the wartime exploits of American Jews, but also included chapters on European Jewish resistance to the Nazis. Davis intended the book "to give the lie to the vicious canard that would imply the Jew lets other people do the fighting and dying in defense of the country of which he is a citizen."62 But such works probably had little impact on those who doubted Jewish participation in American wars. Rather, the stories of Jews who fought for the country became part of internal Jewish dialogue and served as another way that Jews assured themselves that they belonged in America and narrated their own history as American citizens. The accounts describing Jewish participation in the Second World War, especially those published immediately after the conflict, resonated with a distinct tenor. While sounding familiar refrains about Jewish heroism, they also grappled with the loss of millions of European Jews. In 1947, the Bureau of War Records' final report, which included a state-by-state list of every Jewish soldier who served, contained no direct mention of the millions of Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis. Instead, the foreword declared simply that all those who fought in the uniform of the United States "were of one race: the human race: of one faith: the faith of liberty and freedom." This veiled allusion highlighted American democracy but also insinuated, not too subtly, that the Nazis possessed no such ideals and that their sinister policies resulted in the murder of millions of European Jews. Still, alongside the oblique references to what would later become known as the Holocaust lay the more standard tropes celebrating the more than half a million Jews who served in the war: In the ranks of our land armies, our sea forces, our air might, American Jews marched, American Jews fought, American Jews 119

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suffered, bled, died. They behaved as heroes, behaved as men, behaved as Americans. They made their sacrifices side by side with their fellows, on wreck-strewn beaches, in blood-stained waters, in stricken and plummeting aircraft. The Jews of this nation were there, fighting with valor and full measure—and in full proportion to their numbers in the American community.63 In years to come, there would be afloodof literature, pronouncements, and commemorations of all kinds, as American Jews struggled to come to terms with the Holocaust. But in the immediate aftermath of a war in which Jews fought in unprecedented numbers, the rhetoric remained remarkably unchanged, down to the assertion that Jews served in equal or greater proportion to their percentage of the population. Commemorating Jewish War Service Celebrating Jewish war service and honoring military heroes provided perpetual opportunities for public gatherings and communal reflection. Crafting memorials for fallen soldiers became a significant exercise for Jewish communities as early as the Civil War era. In the South, according to historian Jonathan Sarna, Jews even "developed their own nonChristian version of the'Religion of the Lost Cause.'" In 1866, Jewish women in Richmond, Virginia, created the Hebrew Ladies' Memorial Association for the Confederate Dead, an organization devoted to caring for the graves of Confederate Jewish soldiers. The Jewish women's society joined other Christian women's associations in the task of maintaining Confederate burial plots, but its members also envisioned a distinct communal purpose for their work. They intended the graves of Jewish soldiers to "commemorate the bravery of our dead" while also serving as proof of Jewish loyalty to the Confederate cause in the face of "the malicious tongue of slander." Southern Jews likely felt the sting of multiple tongues—a unique combination of the age-old doubts about Jewish valor and the North's castigation of a fallen Confederacy. If anyone should question Jewish service, the women wrote,“then, with a feeling of mournful pride, will we point to this monument and say: 'There is our reply.'" On Memorial Day, Jewish women joined their Christian counterparts throughout the South in decorating the graves 120

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STORIES

of fallen Civil War soldiers, using the occasion to honor "the young men of their nationality who fell in the Confederate struggle."64 Like so many other Jewish expressions of loyalty to the Confederacy, these examples testify to the myriad expressions of American Jewish heritage, which possessed not only political, religious, and ideological variations but local and regional ones as well. RememberingJewish military sacrifice had both an internal and external purpose for Southern Jews; it claimed a Jewish share in the Confederate legacy and served as a sign to potential detractors. As evidence of the position that Jews did attain in the south, the United Daughters of the Confederacy turned to native Virginian and Jewish Civil War veteran Sir Moses Ezekiel to execute the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, dedicated in 1914. Although Ezekiel spent most of his adult life in Europe, he never forgot his Southern roots and was buried at the foot of Arlington's Confederate monument.65 Long after the war ended, Southern Jews participated together with non-Jews in keeping alive the Religion of the Lost Cause. Well into the twentieth century, many Southern Jews decorated their homes with paintings and photographs of Confederate leaders, often comparing them to biblical figures. "You could look into General Lee's face and it was like a benediction," explained one Virginia Jew. "Why, to me he ranked with Moses. We knew that in him there was something to emulate."66 Through the figure of Judah P. Benjamin, elected as a U.S. senator from Louisiana in 1852 before rising to the post of secretary of war and later secretary of state under the Confederacy, Jews claimed their status as citizens of the South. Together with non-Jews, they regularly paid tribute to Benjamin, the most important Jewish figure in Southern history. From the 1920s through the 1940s, several Southern states built markers to commemorate Benjamin's wartime service, coordinating the efforts of Confederate organizations, city officials, and members of the Jewish community. In 1942, at the civic center in Sarasota, Florida, city leaders unveiled a memorial marker to Judah Benjamin, sponsored by the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Jewish community participated in but did not lead the effort, as one of the city's rabbis offered the invocation at the dedication ceremony.67 Nonetheless, the occasion, which took place in the middle of the Second World War, included Jews as central players. "This is an opportune 121

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time to unveil a monument to Judah P. Benjamin, a good Jew," declared the mayor of Sarasota, "for it doesn't make any difference if you are a good Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Unionist or Confederate as long as you are a good American."68 Such words must have been sweet music to local Jews who desired recognition and acceptance for their culture as an essential thread in America's fabric. The cooperation of Jewish and Confederate organizations in memorializingJudah Benjamin occurred again six years later when two synagogues in Charlotte, North Carolina, worked together with the United Daughters of the Confederacy to build a memorial to Benjamin.69 In the co-sponsorship of monuments to Judah Benjamin, Jews secured a place in Confederate memory while Southerners sounded a tone of inclusiveness and tolerance. The Jewish community dedicated the first monument to Jewish soldiers in 1904, in the midst of a nationwide flurry of Civil War monument building. In fact, the years between 1870 and 1910 witnessed the most prolific period of monument building in the nation's history, as Americans of all stripes sought to memorialize war service and create a lasting testimony to patriotic sacrifice.70 It is not surprising that as other Americans began to construct memorials to Civil War soldiers, the Hebrew Union Veterans' Association (a precursor to the Jewish War Veterans) commissioned its own marker to memorialize Jewish sacrifices during the war. Erected in Salem Fields Cemetery in Cypress Hills, New York, one of the largest Jewish burial grounds, the starkly designed monument stands fifty feet tall and is topped with a bronze eagle.71 On the sides are four bronze memorial tablets listing the names of Jewish soldiers. The inscription on the monument reads: "To the memory of the Soldiers of the Hebrew Faith who responded to the call of their country and gave their lives for its salvation during the dark days of its need so that the nation might live."72 The unveiling ceremony, like many of its kind, contained a fair share of pomp and circumstance, including a parade led by the Hebrew Orphan Asylum Band, followed by two hundred marchingJewish veterans. The program featured many dignitaries, both Jewish and non-Jewish, allowing the event to serve simultaneously as an occasion for Jewish collective pride and an opportunity to articulate a shared, interfaith commitment to the nation. The featured speaker, Nathan Straus, denounced the evils of war, but he made a point to cite the numbers of Jews who had fought in American 122

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Figure 9. Monument to Jewish Civil War Veterans, Salem Fields cemetery, Cypress Hills, New York. In 1904, the Hebrew Union Veterans' Association erected this monument to honor Jewish service in the Civil War and memorialize fallen soldiers. Photograph by the author. battles. Relying on the familiar strategy of numerical calculation, Straus explained that during the Civil War "the Jewish population furnished one brave soldier to every twenty-nine persons of its entire population, and more than ten thousand of the flower of its manhood enlisted in the Civil and Spanish wars."73 Standing in one of the country's largest Jewish cemeteries, this monument became, over the years, a site used to memorialize Jewish soldiers who lost their lives in subsequent wars and a permanent testimony to Jewish loyalty and sacrifice. Such commemorations of Jewish war service continued regularly throughout the twentieth century, as the nation participated in subsequent wars. The steady stream of immigration through the 1920s 123

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Figure 10. Jacob Cousins memorial, Portland, Maine. In 1935, Jewish veterans in Portland, Maine, created a memorial to thefirstJewish soldier from the city killed in World War I. Both Jews and non-Jews took part in the dedication ceremony. Photograph by the author. increased the Jewish population significantly, so, naturally, a greater number of Jews served in the two world wars than in previous conflicts. Jewish communities across the country organized ceremonies to honor their war service, providing a window into some of the grassroots campaigns to memorialize Jewish veterans. For example, in 1935, the local Jewish War Veterans post in Portland, Maine, dedicated and donated to the city a small memorial to Jacob Cousins, Portland's first Jewish soldier to die in World War I. The bronze plaque on the stone detailed the soldier's service and stated simply that"[h]e was the first soldier of Jewish faith from this city to make the supreme sacrifice in the line of duty during the World War."74 The dedication ceremony was a community event, involving elected officials and Jewish veterans, as well as both Jewish and non-Jewish civilians from the Portland area. The Jewish community worked to create an elaborate spectacle. The national office of the Jewish War Veterans sent out a letter inviting veterans from nearby states to attend the event. "We hope a large delegation from your post, in uniform if possible, will turn out for this function," declared a letter sent to members.75 As part of the patriotic 124

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performance, some of the children of Jewish veterans dressed in service uniforms for the parade.76 This event, like most others of its kind, also had meaning for the city's non-Jewish residents. The significant numbers of non-Jewish citizens who participated in the dedication seized the occasion to declare their support of the Jewish community and the nation's commitment to equality. "America," declared Portland's mayor in his address to the crowd, "is great only because she is the melting pot of the world but she needed the blood of the Jew and the Gentile to make her the great nation she is."77 Such proclamations were precisely what Jews hoped for when staging these commemorations; coming from non-Jewish officials, they gave Jews cause to believe that their quest for inclusion had succeeded. The Jewish War Veterans, which took the lead in commemorations of military service, consistently made the Jewish community visible in national celebrations. Every Memorial Day, local JWV posts participated in parades across the country, consciously focusing attention on Jewish military contributions. In the mid-i93Os in Buffalo, New York, JWV representatives described how their unit from this small Jewish community marched"[w]ith heads erect and eyes front, withflagsfluttering," noting that "[e] very American of Jewish descent who stood on the side lines of this Parade must have felt a thrilling glow within his heart as our Unit passed by."78 In New York City, Memorial Day parades regularly attracted large crowds, sometimes with ten thousand or more Jewish participants. The 1934 parade featured five bands, a fife and drum corps, and an address by Samuel Untermeyer, a prominent lawyer and civic leader as well as an ardent Zionist and a leading figure in Jewish communal affairs. Before almost every Memorial Day parade, participants gathered at the city's large congregations, such as Temple Emanu-El and the Park Avenue Synagogue, for brief services before joining the parade, lending a tone of religious sanctity to the civic observance.79 The blending of the religious and the civic enhanced the gravity of the occasion, while also securing a place for Jewish distinctiveness within the larger American celebration. For all the triumphant celebration of the parades, many of the JWV's activities remained quite solemn. Members of Jewish War Veterans considered it their duty to decorate the graves of each Jewish soldier on Memorial Day, and the organization constructed detailed rituals for 125

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Figure II. Memorial Day parade outside New York's Park Avenue Synagogue, May 1934. Jewish veterans and spectators gather outside New York's Park Avenue Synagogue to take part in the city's Memorial Day Parade. Jewish War Veterans Collection, American Jewish Historical Society. Reprinted courtesy of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA.

the ceremony. Similarly, the organization provided a blueprint for the funeral of any Jewish veteran, with precise instructions about how all commanders and participants should march and stand and exactly what words should be recited during the ceremony.80 In 1934, and again the following year, Congress designated the Fourth of July as Jewish War Veterans Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At the first observance, the JWV dedicated a memorial plaque, emblazoned with its insignia, to "the honor and memory of the Unknown Soldier," displayed permanently alongside war memorial trophies submitted by other groups. Memorial Day remained the most popular date for JWV gatherings and parades, but the organization often held ceremonies at 126

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Figure 12. Service conducted in New York's Park Avenue Synagogue before the Memorial Day parade, May 1934. Jews gather together for a service in New York's Park Avenue Synagogue before joining in the parade. Jewish War Veterans Collection, American Jewish Historical Society. Reprinted courtesy of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA.

the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the Fourth ofJuly, asking nearby members to attend whenever possible.81 The Unknown Soldier held particular significance for the JWV, which saw in the anonymity of one soldier's death the possibility to define him as a member of any race or religion. Created after World War I, the idea of the Unknown Soldier emerged first in Europe and later in the United States as a means to honor the contributions of ordinary soldiers, to recall the tremendous loss of human lives, and to provide a resting place for the remains of soldiers who could not be identified. Government officials intended the Unknown Soldier to foster national unity and to bring together America's many ethnic and religious groups. 127

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The first ceremony memorializing the Unknown Soldier in 1921 included the Jewish Welfare Board and the Jewish War Veterans, along with African American, Catholic, and other ethnic heritage societies. As many critics observed at the time, the Unknown Soldier depicted in official ceremonies was usually imagined, despite the symbolism, as white and Protestant.82 In fact, as one historian of American memory has noted, a few years after the initial ceremonies, "when the Jewish Welfare Board learned that a proposed monument for the Unknown Soldier's tomb contained a cross, they had to remind the Commission of Fine Arts that this anonymous individual may well have been a Jew."83 Yet, while the dominant culture envisioned the Unknown Soldier as a reflection of the majority, the Jewish War Veterans tenaciously continued to interpret the figure in its own image. As we have seen before, when Christian officials joined in events sponsored by Jewish organizations, they often echoed the sentiments expressed by Jews. Thus, it is not surprising that when the JWV dedicated its plaque in 1934, Maryland Senator Millard E. Tydings pondered, in his remarks, the possibility that the Unknown Soldier might be aJew."Who knows," he speculated, "but if our great hero sleeping in yonder tomb may not himself be a Jew who gave his life for the United States of America?"84 Demonstrating its investment in the idea of the Unknown Soldier, the JWV chose to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 1946 with an historical pageant titled The Unknown Soldier Speaks, The event was produced by Isaac Van Grove, who had also worked on the spectacular Jewish historical pageants The Eternal Road and The Romance of a Peo-

ple, both designed to call attention to the plight of European Jews in the 1930s. The JWV pageant in Chicago Stadium reenacted the participation of Jewish soldiers in battle from the Revolutionary War through World War II.85 This event, like many others, blended entertainment and spectacle with a selective historical narrative designed to elicit Jewish communal pride. The Jewish War Veterans retained a keen sense of the power of history to forge collective identity and a determination to enact that history through ritual. In 1945, as World War II drew to a close, the JWV held an elaborate funeral procession for Daniel Harris, presumed to have been the last surviving Jewish veteran of the Civil War.86 Marching through the Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch in Brooklyn, the 128

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Figure 13. Funeral service for Daniel Harris, February 12,1945. The Jewish War Veterans organized a funeral procession for Daniel Harris, presumed to have been the last surviving Jewish Civil War veteran. Jewish War Veterans Collection, American Jewish Historical Society. Reprinted courtesy of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA.

Jewish War Veterans' procession connected the long tradition of American Jewish sacrifice to contemporary events in the nation. The Second World War and the revelation of the Nazi plan for a Final Solution highlighted the freedom and security offered to Jews in the 129

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United States. With more than half a million Jews serving in armed forces during the war, the JWV's elaborate funeral for a nineteenthcentury Jewish soldier effectively drew attention to the long history of Jewish military contributions. As they laid to rest the last Jewish soldier to serve in the Civil War, the Jewish War Veterans also narrated a history of American Jews and broadcast its lessons to both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. In the mid-1950s, the JWV, looking to fulfill that same mission with a palpable and permanent marker on the American landscape, moved its headquarters from New York City to Washington, D.C. The organization called its new building a National Shrine to the Jewish War Dead and included within its walls a chapel, a museum, a library, record rooms, and a Hall of Heroes. In fundraising material, the organization defined the structure as "a testament to the patriotism of the Jews of America . . . eloquent evidence of love of country and the free way of life, a monument to the fallen, an inspiration to the living."87 The shrine provided a physical space that encompassed many standard elements of Jewish war commemoration: the new edifice showcased historical documents that proved Jewish service, provided a chronicle of the history of Jews in America's wars since the nation's inception, and included spaces for ritual remembrance. In a lighter vein, the Jewish War Veterans also marketed a variety of merchandise in order to heighten the visibility of Jewish war service and to provide tangible reminders of the meaning and purpose of the organization. The JWV's insignia, which graced its membership medallions and the cover of its magazine, reflected the organization's conscious self-definition. According to the words of the membership oath, the emblem represented the relationship between Jews and the United States: Upon the face of the emblem appears the Star of David, historical reminder of our origin as Jews, within the wreath of American victory. Superimposed thereon is the American Eagle, symbolic of freedom, while in the center are inscribed the initials U.S., both of which are emblematic of the highest rights of free men. The entire arrangement typifies the interwoven histories of our steadfast religious belief and continuing loyal citizenship to our nation.88

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WAR STORIES

Figure 14. Cover of The Jewish Veteran, April 1934. The Jewish War Veterans regularly displayed its insignia on the cover of its magazine The Jewish Veteran and on all its materials. Courtesy of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA. That emblem appeared on a host of J W V materials, from military caps and watch chains to automobile reflectors, all designed to raise the profile of the organization. Not surprisingly, many of the items were geared to a male audience, such as the "JayVee" razorblades, advertised as American-made,"with a finer, harder steel and a smoother, keener shaving edge."89 Men, of course, occupied center stage in the Jewish War Veterans, since the organization revolved around the legacy of military service, but women also participated quite regularly and vitally. The Ladies Auxiliary, which admitted any close relatives of J W V members, performed many of the behind-the-scenes activities common to such groups: planning events, cooking, decorating, and a host of other coordinating and organizing tasks. But these women never conceived their roles as menial. The auxiliary crafted its own constitution and bylaws outlining the organization's objectives, which included such lofty goals as maintaining allegiance to the country, encouraging liberty and equality, combating bigotry, and assisting veterans and their families. Like 131

CHAPTER THREE SOMETHING NEW FOR EVERY J. W. V. AUTOMOBILE A J.W.V 1-VnM HJ?MtinolM1 UC^KT rw T hri I

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JEWISH WAR VETERANS

KLU'l'I.V Um'ARTllENT illoni] HnduunTi?r# 176 Fifth Ayenur, New Vor*

Figure 15. Advertisement for the Jewish War Veterans automobile reflector, The Jewish Veteran, July 1935. The Jewish War Veterans encouraged members to purchase these "neat and dignified" blue and white automobile reflectors. Courtesy of the Jewish War Veterans of the USA.

For Perfect Shaves Use the J. W. V. Blade! ,,