"May a Freethinker Help a Pious Man?": The Shared World of the "Religious" and the "Secular" Among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to America

2008 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Polland
Keyword(s):  
Eastern European ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
European Jewish

scholarly journals Becoming Canadian: Folk Literary Innovation in the Memoirs of Yiddish-Speaking Immigrants to Canada

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
Vardit Lightstone
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Literary Innovation

This article considers the ways Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Canada creatively adapted folklore that they learned in “the old home” in order to make it fit their new Canadian contexts, and in doing so created new hybrid folklore and identities. To do this, I discuss the autobiographical texts of three people who migrated between 1900 and 1930, J.J. Goodman’s Gezamelte Shriften (Collected Writings) (Winnipeg: 1919), Michael Usiskin’s Oksn un Motorn (Oxen and Tractors) (Toronto: 1945), and Falek Zolf ’s Oyf Fremder Erd (On Foreign Soil) (Winnipeg: 1945). I argue that these personal narratives offer important insights into how the first major wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Canada formed and expressed Canadian-Eastern European Jewish culture.

A Sociological Portrait of German Jewish Immigrants in Boston: 1845–1861

AJS Review ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 121-152
Author(s):  
Stephen G. Mostov
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Socioeconomic Characteristics ◽  
Jewish Immigration ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
German Jewish

In the growing literature on the socioeconomic characteristics of the constituent immigrant groups of America's cities during the mid-nineteenth century, German Jews have been sadly neglected. The reasons are primarily practical ones. Because “Jewish” or “Hebrew” was neither a census nor immigration category during this period, German Jews are difficult to identify in public records. Furthermore, they generally comprised only a small minority of the total immigrant population in American urban centers prior to the 1880s. Even those specifically interested in American Jewish history have seldom gone beyond cursory analyses of the socioeconomic characteristics of the German Jews, reflecting both the traditional emphasis in Jewish communal histories on institutions and their leaders, and the focusing of attention in such social histories as do exist on the larger and seemingly more significant Eastern European Jewish immigration beginning in the 1880s.

The Bibliothèque Medem: Eighty Years Serving Yiddish Culture

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-34
Author(s):  
Gilles Rozier
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
European Network ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Alliance Israelite Universelle

The Bibliothèque Medem (or Medem-Bibliotek, in Yiddish), in Paris, is the largest Yiddish library in Western and Central Europe, as well as a major Jewish cultural center. Founded in 1928 by a group of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who were aligned with the socialist Bund, its trajectory over eight decades (including the four years of the German occupation) is chronicled here. Today, the collections of the Bibliothèque Medem comprise 20,000 volumes in Yiddish and 10,000 titles in the Latin alphabet dealing with Jewish culture. In addition, it maintains about 30,000 uncataloged book volumes, extensive serial holdings, 300 posters, archives of a number of Yiddish authors, and a sound archive containing 7,500 recordings. Together with the libraries of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Séminaire Israélite de France (SIF), the Bibliothèque Medem is a principal partner in the Réseau Européen des Bibliothèques Judaica et Hebraica (European Network of Judaica and Hebraica Libraries), which administers their union catalog and sponsors digitization projects of their holdings.

scholarly journals ‘In Glasgow but not quite of it’? Eastern European Jewish immigrants in a provincial Jewish community from c.1890 to c.1945

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
AVRAM TAYLOR
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Alternative Description ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
European Jewish

This article makes use of autobiographies and oral interviews in order to explore the lifestyles of the first generation of immigrants within one particular provincial Jewish community – the Gorbals in Glasgow – between 1890 and 1945. The experience of this generation of immigrants was characterised by diversity to an extent that was not true of the second generation. Thus, the community cannot be described in terms of either ‘assimilation’ or ‘separation’. Instead, an alternative description has been coined: ‘variegated acculturation’ in order to encompass the complexity of the lives of the immigrants.

Jews in Small Towns, on the Farms, and In-Between

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen F. Steinberg ◽  
Jack H. Prost
Keyword(s):  
Small Towns ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Cooking Classes

This chapter focuses on Eastern European Jewish settlers in the Midwest. Eastern European Jews left their homes, crossing vast expanses of terrain in all kinds of weather, heading for a harbor where they could board a ship to take them to America. While majority headed straight for urban centers, a smaller number of Jewish immigrants headed toward America's less congested towns and cities. The mass migration that began in 1881 affected the makeup of America's major Jewish centers almost immediately, but it took perhaps a decade, and sometimes longer, for East Europeans to begin arriving in smaller cities and towns in significant numbers. The German-Jews, although somewhat ambivalent toward these newcomers, rallied to provide whatever support they could—money, food, clothing, English lessons, citizenship and cooking classes.

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