JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

the Forverts, a collection known as A Bintel Brief. The thousands
of letters sent to this column by immigrants, beginning
in 1906, bear testimony to the family arguments, difficulties
with raising children, infidelity, divorce, and particularly, cases
of paternal desertion experienced by many Jewish families.
“The number of [Jewish] men who left their families became
so great at one time that the Forverts, in cooperation with the
National Desertion Bureau, established a special column to
trace them” (Metzker, 1972, p. 10).
Another source on Jewish family life from this period,
The Jewish Communal Register (1918), is a compendium of
socio-economic and demographic data on approximately a
million and a half New York Jews, one-half of all the Jews in
the United States at that time. One table, covering the period
from 1901 to 1916, compiled by the United Hebrew Charities,
indicates a steady decrease, from 11,447 to 6,014, in the number
of Jewish families receiving community assistance. As Morris
Waldman, at the time the executive director of the Federated
Jewish Charities of Boston, pointed out:
[T]he striking thing is, that in spite of the rapid increase of the
Jewish population, due to immigration as well as to natural
causes, the number of dependent families has steadily diminished
year by year, not only proportionately, but actually… This
is particularly gratifying in the light of the fact that the number
of dependent families among other elements in the city, judging
by the experience of other private relief agencies, has increased
in proportion to the increase of their population. This
proves that the Jews from eastern European countries are not
willing dependents. On the contrary, they make every effort to
care for themselves and thus remain self-respecting as well as
self-supporting (pp. 991–92).
These words portend the successful social and economic integration
of the American Jewish family into American society
during the coming decades. America was expanding, jobs
were available and workers were needed.
The Mid-Century
Although the challenges of resettlement seemed overwhelming
at the time, the Jewish family, in retrospect, stood up to
them rather well. The evidence for this is the remarkably rapid
social mobility of second-generation American Jews whose
parents, in spite of their struggles, saw to their education and
general welfare. This second era encompasses approximately
40 years divisible, into two periods. The first began roughly
around 1925 and lasted until 1945; the second commenced with
the end of World War II and continued until the mid-1960s.
During the first 20 years immigrant Jewish families underwent
a remarkable social metamorphosis. After World War II they
emerged thoroughly Americanized and ready to reap the benefits
of the country’s post-war economic upsurge.
Quota legislation adopted by Congress in 1921 and 1924,
known as the Johnson Acts, effectively ended 40 years of continuous
immigration to the United States. With the abatement
of mass immigration, the problems of resettlement faded,
and the tenor of Jewish community life changed. Those who
came in the 1880s and 1890s had been here for decades; their
family, american jewish
children were American born and American educated. After
the mid-1920s, integration into the American mainstream
became the most important issue on the Jewish community’s
agenda.
With impressive speed, masses of Jewish families in cities
throughout the United States found the means to relocate
from the area of first settlement to a second, more desirable,
community. As early as 1925, for example, Brownsville had
become the largest center of Jewish population in all of New
York City, more populous than the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
which many of its inhabitants had left in search of cleaner,
healthier, and more spacious living (Landesman, 1969). Geographic
mobility, usually the move from a small apartment
in an older, run down quarter, to a larger apartment or home
in a newer, more prestigious section, was the by-product of
social and economic success. The Menorah Journal of April
1928 points out:
In the United States the benefits of equality have now been attained
for all practical purposes. Every number of every Jewish
weekly in the land points with pride to some Jewish judge
or governor, to Jewish bankers, real estate operators and merchants,
to members of the faith who are actors and authors and
editors, or who have been honored for some success dear to the
hearts of their fellow Americans (ibid., p. 361).
Ironically, the process of becoming established took place
against a backdrop of significant antisemitism and discrimination
which only peaked towards the end of the 1930s. During
these years, “gangs attacked Jews on the streets of Brooklyn
and other eastern cities with little interference from the
police, while organizations calling themselves the Christian
Front of the Christian Mobilizers conducted ‘Buy Christian’
campaigns, cheered the Fuehrer and denounced prominent
American Jews” (O’Brien, 1967, p. 271). If nothing else, the effect
of antisemitic street violence was reason enough for Jewish
families to leave the working class neighborhoods of the
Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn where
older Jewish enclaves bordered the neighborhoods of other
immigrant groups. Both intergroup conflict and increasing
prosperity stimulated geographic mobility.
By 1920, first-generation Jewish immigrants were outnumbered
by their American-born Jewish children who began
“asserting themselves in the Jewish community” (Hutchinson,
1956). “As members of the second generation began to strive
for the values of the dominant society, they introduced the
seeds of conflict into the … community” (Kramer and Leventman,
1961). By the beginning of the 1940s, it was clear that
younger Jewish families, by then virtually all second generation
Americans, bore the values and cultural patterns of their
native land. One observer from that era writes: “Today in
America, Jewry, like a chameleon, has taken on the color of
its new surroundings. Its soul remains divided between the
memory of its Eastern heritage – of traditions nursed through
centuries of ghetto life – and the interests of the community,
which has received it. Its thought has been cast increasingly
in the American vernacular …” (ibid.). Typically, second-gen-
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