Exodus from Europe: Jewish Diaspora Immigration from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States (1820-1914)

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
John P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Employment Education ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
The Mansion

This article examines one of the largest exoduses in human history. In less than three decades, over five million Jews from Poland, Germany, and Russia journeyed to what they considered to be the “American Promised Land.” This study serves five main purposes: first, to identify social, political, and economic factors that encouraged this unprecedented migration; second, to examine the extensive communication and transportation networks that aided this exodus, highlighting the roles that mutual aid societies (especially the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris, the Mansion House Fund in London, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York City) played in the success of these migrations; third, to analyze this diaspora’s impact on the cultural identity of the Jewish communities in which they settled; fourth, to discuss the cultural and economic success of this mass resettlement; and finally, fifth, identify incidents of anti-Semitism in employment, education, and legal realms that tempered economic and cultural gains by Jewish immigrants to America.

scholarly journals “This Is Who I Would Become”: Russian Jewish Immigrants and Their Encounters with Chabad-Lubavitch in the Greater Toronto Area

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 57-80
Author(s):  
Joshua Tapper
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Greater Toronto Area ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Soviet Jews ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Community Centre

Since the early 1970s, the Chabad Lubavitch movement has served as an important setting for religious, social, and cultural activity among Russian-speaking Jewish migrants to Canada and the United States. While scholars and community observers have long recognized the attentiveness of Lubavitch emissaries toward Russian Jews, there is no quantitative data and little qualitative research on Chabad’s influence in the post-Soviet Jewish diaspora. This paper explores the motivations, mechanics, and consequences of this encounter in a Canadian setting, examining how Chabad creates a religious and social space adapted to the unique features of post-Soviet Jewish ethnic and religious identity. Participating in a growing scholarly discussion, this paper moves away from older characterizations of Soviet Jewish identity as thinly constructed and looks to the Chabad space for alternative constructions in which religion and traditionalism play integral roles. This paper draws on oral histories and observational fieldwork from a small qualitative study of a Chabad-run Jewish Russian Community Centre in Toronto, Ontario. It argues that Chabad, which was founded in eighteenth-century Belorussia, is successful among post-Soviet Jews in Canada and elsewhere thanks, in part, to its presentation of the movement as an authentically Russian brand of Judaism—one that grew up in a pre-Soviet Russian context, endured the repressions of the Soviet period, and has since emerged as the dominant Jewish force in the Russian-speaking world. The paper, among the first to examine the religious convictions of Canada’s Russian-speaking Jewish community, reveals that post-Soviet Jews in Toronto gravitate toward Chabad because they view it as a uniquely Russian space.  

Italian and Jewish Intergenerational Mobility: New York, 1910

1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne W. Model
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Intergenerational Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Occupational Structure ◽  
Industrial Experience ◽  
Entrepreneurial Skills ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Although most Italian and Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States during the same turn-of-the-century period, the occupational trajectories of their descendants have been very different. Many writers have emphasized that Jews brought with them urban-industrial experience, entrepreneurial skills, a determination to settle in America, and a reverence for education (Joseph, 1969, orig. 1914; Glazer, 1958). Italians were more often peasants or farm laborers, though their familiarity with commerce and the crafts should not be underestimated (Briggs, 1978; Gabaccia, 1984). Some have also argued that familism and disdain for education further delayed Italian participation in the upgrading of the American occupational structure (Covello, 1972; Child, 1970).

The English diaspora in North America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Bueltmann ◽  
Donald M. MacRaild
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
The Us ◽  
Transnational Communication ◽  
The Uk

From the early eighteenth century, a vibrant English associational culture emerged that was, by many measures, ethnic in character. English ethnic organisations spread across North America from east to west, and from north to south, later becoming a truly global phenomenon when reaching Australasia in the later nineteenth century. This books charts the nature, extent and character of these developments. It explores the main activities of English ethnic societies, including their charitable work; collective mutual aid; their national celebration; their expressions of imperial and monarchical devotion; and the extent to which they evinced transnational communication with the homeland and with English immigrants in other territories. The English demonstrated and English people abroad demonstrated and experienced competitive and sometimes conflictual ethnic character, and so the discussion also uncovers aspects of enmity towards an Irish immigrant community, especially in the US, whose increasingly political sense of community brought them into bitter dispute with English immigrants whom they soon outnumbered. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the extent of English ethnic associational culture in North America was such that it resonated within England herself, resulting in the formation of a central organization designed to coordinate the promotion of English culture. This was the Royal Society of St George. Ultimately, the book documents that the English expressed their identity through processes of associating, mutualism and self-expression that were, by any measure, both ethnic and diasporic in character. The English Diaspora is based on a very large amount of untapped primary materials from archives in the United States, Canada, and the UK relating to specific locations such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Toronto, Ottawa, and Kingston, and London. Thousands of newspaper articles have been trawled. Several long runs of English associational periodicals have been garnered and utilized. Comparative and transnational perspectives beyond the US and Canada are enabled by the discovery of manuscript materials and periodicals relating to the Royal Society of St George.

Tsarist Anti-Semitism and Russian-American Relations

Slavic Review ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann E. Healy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Difficult Situation ◽  
Naturalized Citizens ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Anti Jewish

For over a hundred years the fate of Russian Jews has been of special concern to many Americans. During the first half of this period, tsarist policies toward the Jews were the major irritant in the otherwise comparatively harmonious relations between the United States and Russia. The result was a recurring diplomatic dispute over the Jewish question, the course of which provides a barometer for gauging the changing situation of the Jews in the Russian empire. The dispute centered largely on individual acts of discrimination by Russian officials against Americans. Many of them involved naturalized citizens of Russian origin, most of whom were Jews. Behind the State Department protests on their behalf lay the more complex issue of mounting American indignation at the increasingly difficult situation of Jews in Russia after 1880.American reactions varied from holding public meetings on the issue to exerting pressure on United States government agencies. Former president Ulysses Grant was one of the main initiators of a rally in New York in 1882 protesting anti-Jewish atrocities in Russia. The pogroms received considerable coverage in the Western press: the April 1882 Century, for instance, carried a vivid account of riots that raged for more than twenty-four hours in Elizavetgrad during Easter Week of 1881 and spoke of “world wide sympathy, and a protest almost unprecedented in its swiftness.”

Nativism and Religion in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodger M. Payne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
World Order ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Antebellum Era

Nativism describes an ideology that favors the rights and privileges of the “native born” population over and against those of “foreign” status, however these categories might be defined and ascribed. In the United States, the term has usually been employed to designate hostility against foreign immigration, although nativist arguments have been used against various internal minority groups as well. Although the term is often used as a synonym for the anti-Catholicism of the antebellum era, nativism has usually focused its apprehensions on ethnic and racial differences rather than religious diversity; since religious identity is often interdependent with racial or ethnic heritage, however, any religious divergence from the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture likewise falls under suspicion. While not all forms of religious intolerance in the United States have been grounded in nativist attitudes and activities, the relationship between antipathy toward immigration and antagonism toward certain religions has been a recurrent and resilient theme in American culture. From the various forms of political and social enmity directed against Catholic immigrants during the antebellum era to the passage of Asian “exclusion acts” and the rise of anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and from attitudes toward the civilizing “mission” of the United States to contemporary expressions of Islamophobia, antagonism toward the foreign Other has often been inseparable from expressions of religious chauvinism and xenophobia. Such chauvinism represents an appropriation of the idea of American exceptionalism by participating in the cultural mythology of the American civil religion, which posits both a divine origin of and special destiny for the United States. Scholars of American religion have long traced this theme of American exceptionalism, particularly as it has been expressed through the way in which Americans have read themselves into the biblical narrative as God’s “new Israel,” as a “shining city on a hill,” or as the location for the realization of the Christian millennial hope of a “new heaven and a new earth.” In less biblical but no less religious terms, the United States has been presented as the reification of a “new world order” (novus ordo seclorum, one of the three Latin mottos included on the Great Seal of the United States) or as offering humanity “the last best hope of earth.” By thus conceptualizing “America” as a type of utopian sacred space, these metaphors have simultaneously created the need for establishing the restrictions that mark one’s inclusion or exclusion in this redemptive process. Through identifying the foreign Other—by ethnicity, race, or religion—nativism has been one way to provide this religious function of defining the symbolic boundaries that keep this new “promised land” pure.

scholarly journals The Russian-Jewish New York, the Balfour Declaration and the Revolution in Russia in Leon Kobrin's Play Back to Your People!

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-43
Author(s):  
Galina Eliasberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Political Life ◽  
American University ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Social ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
American Society ◽  
Generational Conflicts

The article analyzes Kobrin’s play Back to Your People! and the Yiddish press reviews of its performances in New York at Boris Thomashevsky’s Peoples Theater in December 1917 by A. Cahan, I. Vartsman, B. Gorin and others. Critics defined the genre of Kobrin’s play variously as “national drama”, “sentimental melodrama”, “modern sketch” and “tendentious drama” but unanimously noted that it was a direct response to the landmark events of 1917, including the Russian Revolution and the Balfour Declaration. These events triggered nationalist feelings and had a significant impact on Jewish socialists like Kobrin, whose writing and political views were strongly influenced by Russian populism. The play depicted a dramatic clash between two cultural models: an American banker as a “self-made man” and the Russian-Jewish intellectual and Zionist leader. It reflected the issues of inter-generational conflicts, Jewish assimilation and anti-Semitism in America. Kobrin portrayed representatives of conservative and liberal circles in American society and demonstrated different attitudes towards the tragedy experienced by European Jewry during the First World War. The depiction of the younger generation allowed Kobrin to show the American university milieu, the work of the settlement house movement and the educational institutions for the Jewish immigrants. The play touched upon the social, intellectual and political life on the Lower East Side.

The Jewish Working Class in America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Walkowitz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Consumer Good ◽  
The United States ◽  
Garment Industry ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Between 1881 and 1924, when federal immigration restrictions were introduced, two and half million Jews from East Europe entered the United States. Approximately half of them settled in New York City where they soon comprised the largest Jewish settlement in the world. The Lower East Side, where families crowded into tenements, became the densest place on the globe. Possessing few skills, Jewish immigrants took jobs with which they had some prior familiarity as peddlers and as workers in the burgeoning garment and textile industries. With the rise of clothing as a mass consumer good, the garment industry emerged as the leading industrial sector in the city. Jewish workers predominated in it. But conditions of sweated labor in shops and factories propelled worker protest. A Jewish labor movement sprung up, energized by the arrival of socialist radicals in the labor Bund. Women workers played a major role in organizing the Jewish working class, spearheading a series of major strikes between 1909 and 1911. These women also staged “meat riots” over inflated beef prices in 1902 and “rent wars” in the early 1930s. To be sure, garment work and the labor movement also shaped the experience of Jewish immigrants in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Jews notably worked in other apparel industries, but the alternative for many (especially in small cities without a garment industry) was peddling and shopkeeping. Self-employed, but situated within and integrated in the working-class community, both sectors reflected the nontraditional nature of the Jewish working class. Jewish peddlers and petty shopkeepers increasingly morphed in a second generation into a middle class in higher status white-collar work. But despite this mobility, Yiddishkeit, a vibrant Jewish working-class culture of Jewish proletarian theater, folk choruses, journalism, education, housing, and recreation, which was particularly nourished by Bundists, flourished and carried a rich legacy forward in the postwar era.

Forverts/Forward

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Rojanski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
English Language ◽  
Editorial Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Yiddish Literature ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward or The Forward) was a Yiddish-language newspaper based in New York City that appeared as a daily for eighty-six years. It was the largest and most influential Jewish newspaper in the world, the most widely read socialist daily in the United States, and the foreign language newspaper with the largest distribution in the United States. Launched on 22 April 1897, Forverts was founded by a group of Yiddish-speaking members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Abraham Cahan (b. 1860–d. 1951) was appointed its first editor. He left after a few months but returned in 1902 to lead the paper for some forty-eight years, until his death. Although Forverts was a Socialist paper, its readership encompassed the broad masses of eastern European Jewish immigrants in early-20th-century America, regardless of their political orientation. As many scholars have argued, Forverts played an important role in the Americanization of its readers, providing them with useful information about their new country and helping them integrate into American life. But it was an immigrant paper in a much deeper sense, too. By adapting ideological ideas and cultural trends from eastern Europe to the American reality, Forverts became instrumental in developing a new kind of secular Jewish identity. Its editorial policy was to preserve a socialist and nonreligious tone, to use simple Yiddish, to publish a range of articles—some more serious, others light—and to serve as a platform for both high-quality and popular literature (shund). As a result, Forverts contributed a great deal to the development of Yiddish literature, and many great Yiddish writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, published in its pages. The paper’s advice column—“a bintl brief” (a bundle of letters)—was especially popular. It regularly printed readers’ questions about important aspects of everyday life together with the editor’s responses reflecting his views on Jewish society and family life in America. No less important was the women’s page, which encouraged women to participate in the job market alongside their family roles. On the political front, Forverts supported the labor movement, participated in Jewish political debates during World War I, and fought immigration restrictions. In its early days, the paper featured anti-Zionist views, though this changed after the Balfour Declaration (1917) and Cahan’s trip to Palestine (1925). Demographic changes following immigration restrictions in the 1920s caused a gradual decline in its distribution. The paper continued as a daily until 1983, when it became a weekly. In 1990 an English-language weekly joined the Yiddish newspaper. Since early 2019, both the Yiddish and the English editions are entirely digital.

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