#039 - Jewish history in America.

#039 - In  this episode Gabi gives a more developed account of the history of the Jewish migrations in the US.

Check out the URL for the documentary 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMd0hs2fkT0&t=21s

The History of the Jewish People in America by Peter Wiernik
https://www.amazon.com/History-Jewish-People-America-Discovery-ebook/dp/B09QBV4ZRG

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https://learninglanguagesinsocietywithgabi.com/blog/

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Transcript

Hi everybody, my name is Gabby and welcome back to your favorite show, Learning Languages in Society with Gabby.  

Today, I would like to speak about a really cool subject, one that I find fascinating actually, and it is a continuation of the episode number 37 of my podcast called Introduction to Jewish History.

So, in order to, uh, record this episode, I read many articles and also read a fascinating book called The History of the Jewish People in America by Peter Wiernick. And I watched an incredible documentary called The Jewish Americans. They Came to Stay in America. And a world of their own and the Jewish Americans the best of times the worst of times. 


So I wholeheartedly recommend you to watch the documentary and read the book  I'm going to leave the links of the documentary and the book in this episode so you can guys Have a look later. 

Right. So let's begin.  Uh, I'm going to be talking about the Jewish diaspora in America, or maybe more correctly put in the US. The history of the Jewish migrations to America, which is how I like to think about  this obviously, I'm going to synthesize the info containing both the documentary and the book and I'm also going to be making my own conclusions and Talking from my own perspective, right? 

In 1654, 23 Jewish men, women, and children fled from the former Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, after the Portuguese recaptured Brazil and introduced the Inquisition. So the Jewish experience with the Inquisition, as you all know, had been pretty terrible. There was persecution, there was forced conversion, torture, expulsion, all of it.

So these reasons, uh, made the Jews flee for a better place to be, right? They were forced out of Brazil and so they sailed toward the settlement in Lower Manhattan, which was called New Amsterdam at the time.  They, uh, they tried to, they tried to reach the, the harbor. 

They, they even got there, but they were Soon turned away  Because they just didn't want the jews Uh over there, but in holland, there was an order that was given to let them stay So they were granted the right to stay in America because presumably they could make fortune So they were valuable for holland back in the day Which was the ruling country at the time For thousands of years, the Jews have lived in many, many different places across the world.

But America appeared to be their answer to their prayers.  To be Jewish in America nowadays is synonymous to a certain one's origin, and be proud of it, without any fears to be ostracized, discriminated against. Or even worse things. At least this is what Jews thought, but America has not always been a safe haven. 

Like other minorities, they embraced America, but Americans or America not always embraced them. Jewish have been often excluded. Sometimes they were mocked and sometimes they were asked if they had horns.  And they were often associated with negative stereotypes such as being greedy, uh, you know, the, uh, the greedy Jew and believing themselves to be the chosen people by God.

To be Jewish, in other words,  uh, was a puzzle for many Americans because they'd never seen a Jew before, so they didn't really know what to make of them. You know, they, uh, they read in Hebrew, uh, their holy book, uh, they couldn't mix meat and milk, which was pretty odd. Their names were different, uh, their holy text was, uh, as I said, in Hebrew, the Sabbath was Saturday, nothing matched with, uh, the Christians in, in America at the time, obviously.

It was also a little odd that a lot of them, uh, ascertained their identity in Jewishness. They found their identity in being Jewish.  Uh, the Jews were pretty outstanding at climbing the social ladder. So many of them were just peddlers or shopkeepers at the beginning. And, and their children, uh, just one generation after it became doctors, engineers, lawyers, and so on. 

It's also pretty interesting to keep in mind how for a Jew, it is perfectly okay to live in a different country, in a different place. That's not, that's not something to worry about too much. Uh, as long as their security is not compromised, obviously.  But they would never identify themselves as anything other than Jewish.

Things have obviously changed a lot for, uh, the Jews in America. They have, as I said before, climbed the social ladder. Latter. So there's about 6 million Jews right now in America. A lot of, uh, Jewish families became rich in upper class and they would mix pretty well with upper class New York Christians, for example, although it's true that Jewish families of upper class still chose to marry with other Jews, but you know, sometimes some married out of, um, out of their faith.

But things were not always easy for them. Uh, they couldn't vote. They needed something that's. That was called the Jew bill in order to to be able to vote  Many of them really didn't really quite understand what their place in America was and a lot of them what they tried to do was transform the synagogues and into synagogue  synagogues that were like churches Because they had all this fear that they experienced back in Europe So the backlash of going to the synagogue, right because of that so they try to kind of turn those, uh synagogues into More more like church looking places of cult, right?

So, uh  Yeah, they uh mostly traveled across the country as peddlers when they started coming in europe So that was uh, that was a typical Idea that americans would have of the jews  peddlers as they were also Uh peddlers in europe. So when they settled in america Well, that's what they knew to do. They they knew they knew they could become peddlers as well That's the only pretty much the only thing they could uh They could do at the beginning.

Uh, a lot of those peddlers then  Stopped traveling across the country and opened shops You Uh, where they sold different sort of things and those shops in turn were transformed with time into different other businesses. There were a lot of cliches for the Jews as not being trustworthy, being manipulative. 

People from the Old Testament, so some of them were good  cliches, let's say. A lot of the Jews that came were met both with curiosity and disdain.  They were most of the time just tolerated,  but at worst,  They were persecuted, right? And whenever a crisis hit, they were the scapegoats all the time. They became the scapegoats. 

So, uh, the Lehman brothers, for example, uh, they came from Bavaria and they settled in Montgomery, Alabama. They opened a store called Lemon Bros. They made their money with cotton. There were many cases of, uh, entrepreneurs that were Jews that became very rich. So, for example, Levi Strauss is one of them, uh, they, they made a lot of, uh, fortune outfitting miners in the gold rush, during the gold rush.

They made pants, they made blue jeans, and so on and so forth. There's, for example, also the case of Mayor Guggenheim, who came from Switzerland with his family, and they made their money mining silver and lead.  Other remarkable people was the Rabbi Isaac Mayer Weiss. He was an immigrant from Bohemia, Czech Republic.

He made a reform in Judaism, hoping to adapt Jewish rituals to the Christian faith as a way to assimilate better. He made all types of, uh, transformations. He, uh, played music or they would play music in sacred days, which is supposedly not permitted. Uh, he would offer sermons on Sundays, and they did this in English, so not in Yiddish.

He would also introduce mixing men and women. In the same place, like men and women sitting down next to each other, which was completely, uh, seen as a revolution. So there you have it. Reform Judaism was somehow a blend of American styles and Jewish traditionalism.  So many Jews wanted to be like upper class Jews.

They wanted to join this church.  That was, for example, the case of Levi Strauss and Marcus Goldman, who also joined this, uh, this synagogue. What's interesting about the higher or the upper class society, uh, of the Jews was that they would often,  they would be pleased to have come so far. They, uh, they had all those close knit businesses.

Type of thing, uh, that would hire family members or nephews and, and so on. So they kind of created their own high Jewish society, which was an alternative to the, uh, to the high society of the Christians, right? And my guess is that they did this as a means not to be, uh, segregated from, from them or not to feel rejected by the Christians.

So I guess they created their own bubble.  So at the beginning times were really hard for, for the Jews because they realized that even though they had climbed the social ladder, uh, they owned businesses and they had more means for money and more material success. They were still not fully accepted by.

their Christian counterparts. Um, so that was, that was pretty, uh, tough for them to, to assimilate, I guess. Um,  and even within the, the Jews, there were divisions, for example, a lot of the Jews that were already integrated in America, they did not really accept well Eastern European Jews. So when they came and started combating hordes, they, they just don't, they didn't know what to do with them.

There was a huge gap between. Eastern European Jews who barely spoke any English and who were fleeing from terrible conditions and the Jews that were already well settled in America, uh, Jews settled. Across big cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Luis, and they were never very far from the New York docks where they first arrived.

Uh, they kind of created a world of their own. For example, the lower east side was their neighborhood. So there were, uh, Jews from Turkey, from Greece, from parts of the Ottoman Empire. There were also Chinese, Irish, and Germans living there, but most of the, the people who lived in the Lower East Side were still Jewish. 

So the area that comprised, uh, the Lower East Side  was, uh, the Jewish population center of the world. It was believed that there were about 500, 000 Jews over there with a huge density. So in one, one part of the documentary, they show something that I found really, uh, Really interesting and beautiful at the same time. 

Uh, when the families that settled in, in those districts, in that district, in that area, they, uh, started to have a little bit more money and they could afford to buy new clothes, they would wear clothes, uh, modern clothes, like Americans would and, and they would take pictures and send them back home. Uh, given the, uh, impression that they had made money and they had really made it, uh, to the people back home, even though they barely spoken English at all.

So that was, uh, that was interesting. That was funny.  They even created a newspaper that was written in Yiddish so that people would be informed of what was going on in the world. So they had a lot of, um, uh, readers and it grew really, really big. And, uh, it was fun because they would like have this section where you would have this rabbi giving advice to readers.

So whenever they, a reader would send a letter, uh, to, to the, to this newspaper. inquiring the rabbi about something that was going on, something that was wrong in his or her life, uh, the rabbi would have, the rabbi would have an incredible good answer to, to this question.  He would give advice on how to feel better integrated in America for those who would write about how lonely they felt in this new country, having migrated there. 

He would also consult those who would write about, uh, women, for example, who would write about trying to go to school there. So he would encourage them to, to get an education.  

Another part that was interesting in the documentary was that, The Jews became very big, uh, with, uh, factories, tailored factories, where they had these tiny rooms where they would keep a lot of workers, mostly women, uh, working there in bad conditions, they were exploited, uh, these, these places would be called sweatshops, because, because obviously you weren't sweating the whole time.

In summer, it was unbearable to be there, apparently. These places apparently were pretty terrible. There was a thing called child labor So that existed at the time and you could hardly blame the christians because most of the workers were jewish And the owners as well were jewish. So, uh  There you go. So there, there was no, uh, discrimination, religion or ethnic wise.

Uh, it was just them with them, right? Um, it was just them doing, doing that, those bad things onto themselves, uh, so to speak. Uh, so there's, there's this part in the, 

in the  documentary where they talk about a fire. That was a disaster. It started in the ninth floor and it was because it was a fire in one of those big buildings, uh, where they would keep, uh, those rooms and people working there,  you know, with the sewing machines, right?

And so it was pretty bad. It happened in March in  1910. Uh, there was a fire and the doors were closed, maybe because they wanted, you know, To keep the employees at all times inside the factory, uh, and they would probably just open the doors whenever it was time for them to just go back home.  Uh, but it was, it was, uh, there was a fire.

Somebody must have tossed a cigarette butt or something and, uh, on the place was lit on fire and, and many, many people died. So most of the workers, as I said before, were women that would jump out of the, of the windows, like around 62 women died.  Uh, that's pretty bad. And there was a Jewish labor committee that was formed after that to fight against, uh, the exploitation, uh, of Jews, right?

So yeah, so a lot of Jewish people joined unions to protect the, the workers from being exploited by the owners of, of these, of these businesses.  And also as it is the case often, uh, there was a lot of crime in the streets. They started to have, uh, they started to have a lot of criminals out there, people stealing and doing bad things.

Um, and so a lot of the, uh,  A lot of the Italians and Jews at the time in these neighborhoods became criminals, and although,  uh, people knew they were criminals, they kind of, they didn't sort of, uh, throw  the blame on, on these people, they realized that it was poverty that would make these people become, uh, criminals, and so, the Jews thought that crime was a result of poverty, and they tried to, uh, blend with, uh, German Jews who had money, Uh, to try to ask them, uh, for benevolent protection.

And so, so the German Jews did try to help after that, actually. 

There was a nurse called, uh, Lillian Wald, nicknamed the Angel of Henry Street. She founded, uh, the Henry Street Settlement, which is a not for profit social service agency.  In the lower east side neighborhood of manhattan. So, uh, there were a lot of people trying to help stop poverty in In in that district.

She obviously didn't have much money. Uh, so she had to ask  a person a man called jacob henry schiff who was a famous philanthropist to Please help her with  With her nursing project and and he did You  So nowadays, that nursing house has about one billion dollars of a budget and it has about 30, 000 visits every day now. 

And then I feel like another important part of the documentary revolves around Jewish theater. So  the Jewish theater was important because, uh, it united people in, uh, the, they had the, the theater place in Yiddish, which was really important because the language sort of, uh, englobed all these different people.

Uh, there was this man called Baruch Aaron Tomaszewski,  which was a Who was a Ukrainian born Jewish singer and actor, and he became one of the biggest stars in Yiddish theater. He was the pioneer in, uh, of taking Yiddish theater on the road in the United States. So thanks to him, they performed in different cities across the U S. 

They, uh, mention also, uh, big names. For example, Hank Greenberg, who was a baseball player at the time. So he, uh, they talk about his story. They said that he was a hero for the Jewish kids at the time. He made it obvious for a lot of kids that. You could be Jewish and still be, um, on a sports band, a big, uh, baseball player and become a star so you didn't have to go down the, um, intellectual path, but you could also become pretty big in the sports and be loved by everybody else.

They also mentioned, uh, the story of Irving Berlin, who was a, was an American composer, also Jewish. And obviously, um, he was a composer and a songwriter. And he would obviously draw inspiration from the migrants around him who would sing, and so he would make, uh,  funny songs and he would talk about being a cheap Jew as well.

And so the funny thing is that he always wanted to write in English. So as to give birth to himself, he didn't want to do that in Yiddish. And so he composed big songs, like for example, God bless America in 1818. And although the song is, uh,  supposed to be, uh, a modern song, it still has some undertones, um, some, uh, all Yiddish, uh, folk music, uh, which is kind of interesting actually.

And then in 1924, there were, uh, there was a rigid quota. That came into place. It was like a rigid quota system uh, which made which made it impossible for other people other undesirable aliens as they called south, uh, southern europeans eastern europeans asians And obviously jews To gain entry into the united states.

So, uh, it made it really hard for a lot of people to find safe haven in the U. S. as they had previously done before. Another interesting fact is that there was only a tiny minority of American Jews who supported Zionism. They were happy in America after all, they had found a place, uh, where to live, where to be happy.

And so they didn't think that Some lost place in Jerusalem was there was her place to to be Uh, there's also a mention in the documentary that I find, uh, quite interesting that it was frank's trial and conviction and  Uh, he's not being from prison, uh, Estonia. That's pretty hard, I just realized this is other people's, uh, Henry Ford is one of them.

Yeah, there's mentions of anti Semitism within, uh, the documentary as well. For example, Henry Ford,  uh, which was, was one of the richest American men at the time, was profoundly anti Semitic. Uh, he founded a paper, and for 48 weeks straight, he railed against the Jews. He hated the unions, the bankers, and it bothered, it just bothered him that most of the, the owners and most of the people creating these places were Jews. 

He was sued by a famous lawyer, uh, called Zapito  and Sapir made him, uh, take his words back and he was forced to apologize in the newspaper that he had created. But, and he did, publicly did, and his newspaper was over, but his, uh, views on anti Semitism, on Judaism, on Jews, never actually, uh, stopped.  Uh, also, during the documentary, they make reference to an interesting fact, they said that Jews had restricted systems to enter universities, so they had to work twice as hard to be accepted.

And to, and to have a place in university. Uh, it was so much so that in 1922, the president of Harvard spoke about his concern because of too many applicants were Jews. And so there were, uh, in 1920 quotas for Jews of about 10% max.  A lot of people tried to, uh, fit in. And so they change their names to cope, uh, in their own way with, uh, with the problem of being Jewish in a mostly Christian society. 

They tried to hide from the fact that they were Jewish. So,  it was pretty bad. Anti Semitism has always been a tradition in America. So, in some places they had, uh, it was written at the entrance, no dogs or Jews allowed at dinners, at restaurants.  It was also unspoken law that a lot of big factories, car factories, would not allow Jews to work there. 

The Jews saw a place to grow big in America in public schools. That that's where they thought they could become something. So they didn't want to be, they didn't, the women didn't even want to be pretty or anything, or, or they, everybody wanted to become smart and to go to school. They saw their ticket to assimilate in America that way.

So they wouldn't teach their children Yiddish. It's not to get confused with English. Uh, so they pretty much saw. public school as a way to become American.  Uh, even religion took a backseat  as opposed to, um, to, to education. 

The Jewish would vacation in a place near New York called the Catskin Mountains. There were really hills, not really mountains, but they were called Catskin Mountains and everybody went there to socialize and meet other people and try to meet, you know,  Maybe, uh, a young person they liked so as to, you know,  uh, maybe marry that person.

And so it was nice because there were shopkeepers, there were people who had grocery stores and, and they wanted, and they knew that they could have holidays. Or vacations, which was really weird at the time, because they didn't used to have that. So now they knew they had, uh, they were granted this opportunity.

So the quintessential Jewish joke in the mountains was, this lady was checking out of the hotel, and as she was checking out, she came to the owner and said, the food here is poison, plain poison.  And such small portions.  So Jews liked the entertainment and they loved theater. They liked Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Judy Holliday, Carl Rainer, Mel Brooks, Alan King, Lenny Brooks, Jerry Stiller.

All of these people were Jewish comedians.  Uh, Metro Golden Mayor was created, uh, as well by, by, uh, Jewish, uh, entrepreneurs. Uh, they created Dandy Hardy, which was a good American old family. There was love and sentimentality. Uh, there was good old fashioned American and Jewishness in it. 

Uh, they enjoyed, uh, Christmas and Western, uh, with his family. Uh,  he as much as he could.  Uh, so they, the Jews would create stories where that people wanted to hear, right? So they didn't do anything that had any Jewishness in it.  Uh, some of the actors that assimilated or changed their names to be able to fit better, uh, we have, for example, the case of Kurt Douglas.

Whose real name was  Kurt, uh, Douglas. Real name was Isur Danielovich Demski. Emanuel Goldberg became Edward G. Robinson. Betty Joanne Perske became Lauren Bacall. Bernie Schwartz became Tony Curtis and Freddie Roman, uh, was really a Fred Kirschenbaum. So they all changed their names in order to adapt.  Then the Great Depression came, and it was really bad for Jews because they not only faced unemployment, but they were also blamed for it. 

So, there was this man called Charles Kochban, he didn't really like the Jews and he had three million radio listeners. He was a Christian, uh, there was, uh, Charles Lindbergh,  who was praised by everybody and who also despised, uh, the Jews. And there were Nazi style American organizations, uh, who championed anti Semitism in 1938. 

Uh, Jews organized unions really strongly, they supported Franklin Roosevelt. It was their hero. In 1938, Superman was created,  um, and also there was comics, uh, animated cartoons, radio TV movies, and these two Jewish, uh, boys created it, uh, Jerry Siegel and his friend.  So Superman would take Hitler and capture him and brought him to the League of Nations in the cartoons.

In 1940, though, Hitler was invisible, invincible,  He raised to power a decade before, but could not do anything, uh, but the Jewish could not do anything about it. He, uh, he sent thousands of people to concentration camps. American Jews were frightened, but, by what was happening in Europe, but they didn't know what to do. 

The summer of 1941 was the time when the mass murder of Jews, uh, began in secrecy.  So the first reports came one year later and America was in war with Germany. So Franklin Roosevelt was called  The Jew Judea by the Nazis. They didn't like him And but he didn't want Americans to think of the war as a Jewish war He wanted to rescue the Jews by winning the war And stop the murders the jews reached to henry morgentau  that june for Who was a jew who worked with franklin roosevelt? 

And they asked him for help. So This man morgentau descended from rabbis. He and his family were the only jews roosevelt knew socially in 1943 There was a meeting in the oval office where people close to roosevelt Showed him an official letter and had a conversation with him to save the Jews because they were convinced that they had to stop it.

And in 1944, the World Refugee Board started saving Jews from Europe. They started to Um, welcome refugees, Jewish refugees from the war. So the board helped as many as 20, 000 Jews.  Morgenthau wanted to destroy factories of Germans, uh, and made him become farmers, but his proposals went nowhere.  So later they started showing in the movies, in the movie theaters in America, the, the old concentration camps, uh, in Europe and how horrible those things were.

So  that was pretty bad. Anyway.