Review - American Jewish Archives

184 American Jewish Archives
dispersion of Chicago Jewry. The volume on Boston is published to
celebrate the centenary of an institution that tied and ties this dis-
persing and transforming community together. In this context it is
memorable that Jewish communities in the United States faced
similar challenges early on; Chicago's United Hebrew Relief Asso-
ciation, the forerunner of what is today the Jewish Federation of
Chicago, was founded in 1859 to care for poor Jews in Chicago, but
it also served as the common platform for a community that was
splitting quickly along religious, regional, and social lines." Ameri-
canization has always been a double-edged sword for Jews. On the
one hand America made Jewish immigrants free; the movement of
most American Jews into the suburbs illustrates the unhindered so-
cial rise of successive generations of Jewish immigrants. On the
other hand, Jewish communities struggled early on against the
forces of assimilation and dispersion. This American paradox con-
tinues to challenge American Jews as a group, and the two vol-
umes on Boston and Chicago offer apt descriptions of Jewish
strategies to cope with this ambivalent challenge, while, at the
same time, the books are primary sources for future historians who
will interpret this paradox.
-Tobias Brinkmann
Tobias Brinkmann is completing his doctoral dissertation, a study of German
Jews in Chicago, 1840-1900, at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany.
Notes
I. Stephen Mostov, 'A Sociological Portrait of German Jewish Immigrants in
Boston: 1845-1861" (AJS Review, 1978) (3): 127f.
2. Chicago Tribune, October 21,1871. This event is not even mentioned by Cutler.
3. James R. Grossman, Introduction to the 1990 facsimile edition. In Meites, Histoy
of the Jews of Chicago, reprint, (Chicago ~ggo), without page number.
4. Jeffrey S. Gurock, "Time, Place and Movement in Immigrant Jewish Historiography:'
in Leo Landmann, ed., Scholars and Scholarship-The Interaction Between
Judaism and Other Cultures, (New York, ~ggo), 169-85.
5. The works are listed in Cutler's bibliography.
6. Areprint of Meites's History was published in 1990 by the Chicago Jewish Historical
Society and is still available in bookstores.
7. Grossman, Introduction.
8. "Our Russian Exiles." Chicago Tribune, July 19,1891.