The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th to the 21st Century

325 Pages·2021·3.849 MB·English

by  Daniel Soyer

The Jewish
Metropolis
New York City
from the 17th
to the 21st Century
The Lands and Ages of the Jewish People
Series Editor: Ira Robinson (Concordia University, Montreal)
The Jewish
Metropolis
New York City
from the 17th
to the 21st Century
Edited by
Daniel Soyer
B O S TO N
2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Soyer, Daniel, editor.
Title: The Jewish metropolis : New York from the 17th to the 21st century
/ edited by Daniel Soyer.
Other titles: New York from the 17th to the 21st century
Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Series: The lands and
ages of the Jewish people
Identifiers: LCCN 2020046615 (print) | LCCN 2020046616 (ebook) | ISBN
9781644694886 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644694893 (paperback) | ISBN
9781644694909 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644694916 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews--New York (State)--New York--History. | Jews--New
York (State)--New York--Social life and customs. | New York (State)--
New York--Ethnic relations. | New York (N.Y.)--Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC F128.9.J5 J578 2021 (print) | LCC F128.9.J5 (ebook)
| DDC 974.7/004924--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046615
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046616
Copyright © 2021 Academic Studies Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN 9781644694886 (hardback)
ISBN 9781644694893 (paperback)
ISBN 9781644694909 (adobe pdf)
ISBN 9781644694916 (ePub)
Book design by Lapiz Digital Services.
Cover design by Ivan Grave.
Published by Academic Studies Press.
1577 Beacon Street
Brookline, MA 02446, USA
[email protected]
www.academicstudiespress.com
Contents
Introduction: New York as a Jewish City vii
Daniel Soyer
Important Note xvi
1. Colonial Jews in New Amsterdam, New York, and the Atlantic World 1
John M. Dixon
2. New York Jews and the Early Republic 19
Howard B. Rock
3. The Other Jews: Jewish Immigrants from Central Europe
in New York, 1820–1880 39
Tobias Brinkmann
4. From the Pale of Settlement to the Lower East Side:
Early Hardships of Russian Jewish Immigrants 62
Gur Alroey
5. Yiddish New York 91
Ayelet Brinn, Eddy Portnoy, Daniel Soyer
6. “Impostors”: Levantine Jews and the Limits of Jewish New York 115
Devin E. Naar
7. Jewish Builders in New York City, 1880–1980 147
Deborah Dash Moore
8. New York Jews and American Literature 168
David Mikics
9. “I Never Think about Being Jewish—Until I Leave New York”:
Jewish Art in New York City, 1900 to the Present 184
Diana L. Linden
10. Jewish Geography in New York Neighborhoods, 1945–2000 205
Jeffrey S. Gurock
vi Contents
11. New York and American Judaism 229
Rachel Gordan
12. Jews and Politics in New York City 256
Daniel Soyer
13. How Are New York City Jews Different from Other American Jews? 278
Steven M. Cohen
Contributors 296
Index 299
Introduction:
New York as a Jewish City
Daniel Soyer
American culture makes a close association between Jews and New York
City. The popular imagination associates Jews with New York foodways
(deli, bagels), speech (Yiddish vocabulary), attitudes and manner (speed,
brusqueness, irony, sarcasm), industries (garments, banking, entertain-
ment), politics (liberalism, neo-conservatism), high culture (visual arts,
literature, music, social criticism), and popular culture (theater, advertising,
music). Some, like the comedian Lenny Bruce, have seen the Jewish and
New York essences as virtually identical. “To me,” Bruce remarked, “if you
live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter even
if you’re Catholic; if you live in New York you’re Jewish.” American Jews,
conversely, have often emphasized the links between New York Jews and
Jews in other parts of the country. Indeed, Jews in other places sometimes
defined themselves in relation to New York, their own communities having
emerged as colonies of the New York metropole.1
1 See Ted Merwin, Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New
York: NYU Press, 2015); H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the
Development of English in the United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 216–
18, 368, and Supplement I (New York: Knopf, 1945), 433–35; Hana Wirth-Nesher,
“The Accented imagination: Speaking and Writing Jewish America,” in Imagining the
American Jewish Community, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Hannover/Waltham: University
Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 2007), 287–88; Lenny Bruce, How to
Talk Dirty and Influence People (1962; New York: Fireside / Simon and Schuster, 1992),
5 (Google Books, accessed December 25, 2017); Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden
Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York: Free Press,
1994), 1–6, 32, 37, 47, 49–50, 59, 62, 63–64, 70, 85–86, 208, 260, 275.
viii Introduction: New York as a Jewish City
Among scholars, the tendency to identify New York with Jewish America
is evident even in the titles of such classic works as Moses Rischin’s Promised
City (New York as the New Jerusalem) and Deborah Dash Moore’s At Home
in America (New York as America itself). More recently, despite a growing
body of literature on the history of Jews elsewhere or more self-consciously
on the creation of the New York image, historians frequently make the easy
assumption that New York was somehow a “Jewish city.”2
In fact, both scholars and lay people have good reason to think of New
York as a Jewish city. Since the end of the nineteenth century, there have
been more Jews in the Big Apple than in any other single municipality—
more than there ever were in Warsaw, Vilna, Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem. For
much of the period, the city’s Jewish population could only be compared to
those of other countries. In 1930, for example, the five boroughs’ 1.8 million
Jews about equaled those of Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Germany, and
Palestine put together. In 1950, the city’s 2 million Jews were twice those of
Israel, and about same in number as those of the Soviet Union. Even after
fifty years of decline, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, 972,000
New York Jews outnumbered those of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined.
Looking at it another way, for a time in the mid-twentieth century, Jews
were the largest single ethnic group in the city, at about 30% of the pop-
ulation.3 Moreover, the significance of New York goes beyond numbers.
As Stephen Whitfield put it, “The culture of American Jewry was born in
Eastern Europe and was then transplanted and refashioned in cities such as
2 Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1962); Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second
Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). See also Hasia
Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000); Hasia Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth Wenger, Remembering
the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2000). The author observed historians making the assumption that New York was
a “Jewish city” at a recent working group on New York City Jewish history at the Center
for Jewish History, New York.
3 Moore, At Home in America, 23; H. S. Linfield, “Statistics of the Jews,” American Jewish
Yearbook 32 (1930/1931): 227, 229; Evyatar Friesel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 17; “Jewish Population Estimates of Selected
Cities,” 73, and Leon Shapiro and Boris Sapir, “World Jewish Population,” 247, 249,
both in American Jewish Yearbook 51 (1950); Jewish Community Study of New York,
2002 (New York: UJA-Federation, 2004), 30; Central Bureau of Statistics, “Localities
and Population, by Type of Locality and Population Group,” https://www.cbs.gov.il/
he/publications/doclib/2002/2.%20shnaton%20population/st02_12x.pdf, accessed
September 10, 2020.
Introduction: New York as a Jewish City ix
New York.”4 No wonder that Academic Studies Press commissioned a book
on New York City Jewry for its Lands and Ages of the Jewish People series,
alongside volumes on Germany, Canada, and Medieval Iberia.
But is New York really a Jewish city? Jews were never a majority of
the population, as they were in Salonica or Bialystok, or in many East
European shtetlekh. Neither were Jews the largest religious group, which
from the mid-nineteenth century were Catholics. Indeed, it is possible to
write the histories of many crucial aspects of the city’s overall history and
hardly mention Jews at all.5
New York Jews knew this. There were many neighborhoods in the city
where they did not feel at home, and memoirists such as Alfred Kazin and
Vivian Gornick comment on the foreignness and exoticism of the city’s
Manhattan core. Even at their demographic peak, then, Jews felt more at
home in some parts of New York than others.6
It probably makes more sense to think about when, how and where
New York has been a Jewish city. Indeed, it is not even so obvious what
“Jewish” has meant in New York. The city has been home to a wide range
of Jews and Jewishness: Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi; German and
East European; poor garment workers and wealthy financiers; English,
Yiddish, German, Ladino, Arabic, and Hebrew speakers; women and men;
Orthodox, Reform, and secular; leftwing and rightwing; immigrant and
native-born; gay and straight; Manhattan sophisticates and “outer borough”
middle-Americans, and so on. The New York Jewish experience has been
so diverse that it would take, indeed has taken, multiple volumes to cover
adequately.7 This book thus only provides an entrée to the topic.
4 Stephen Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hannover/Waltham:
University Press of New England / Brandeis University Press, 1999), 1.
5 T. J. Shelley, “Catholics,” in Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995), 192; James T. Fisher, On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and
the Soul of the Port of New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
6 Beth Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996), 81; Moore, At Home in America, 86.
7 For a treatment of the history in three volumes, see Howard Rock, Haven of Liberty:
New York Jews in the New World, 1654–1865, Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging
Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920, and Jeffrey S. Gurock,
Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920–2010, all parts of City of
Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, ed. Deborah Dash Moore (New York: New
York University Press, 2012). A one-volume version is Deborah Dash Moore et al., New
York Jews: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2017).
x Introduction: New York as a Jewish City
Periodization and Jewish Diversity in New York
The customary periodization of New York Jewish history only obscures the
diversity of the city’s Jewish life since the seventeenth century. During the
“Sephardic Period” from 1654 to 1825, for example, the single congregation
served as the center of all aspects of Jewish communal life. Shearith Israel
used the Sephardic rite, but as early as 1720, the majority of local Jews, and
thus of synagogue members, were Ashkenazim. In any case, their numbers
remained small—400 in 1775, about 1.6% of the city’s population. No one
yet saw any particular connection between New York and Jews.
It was during the “German Period” (1825–1880) that New York became
a significant Jewish population center. By 1880, there were some 80,000
Jews in the city.8 But not all of them were “German,” whatever that may
have meant at the time. The descendants of colonial Jewry—Sephardic and
Ashkenazi—remained, of course. But the new immigrants, too, actually
came from a range of places in Central Europe: the German states, Posen
(western Poland, under the control of Prussia), Alsace, Bohemia, Moravia,
Hungary, Lithuania, and so forth. Moreover, they now created a diverse
Jewish communal structure, pioneering new modes of expressing Jewish
identity and formal affiliation. Not only were there many new congrega-
tions organized according to old-world origin and tradition, but some
congregations began to innovate new styles of worship that coalesced
into the Reform movement in Judaism. As importantly, some began
to experiment with new forms of secular Jewish expression, including
fraternal orders such as B’nai B’rith, and philanthropic endeavors like Jews’
Hospital (later Mt. Sinai).
In popular culture, the Jewish image sometimes merged with that of
the Germans, but although they were still less than ten percent of the city’s
population, for the first time an association of Jews with New York, or at
least parts of it, began to emerge. The Chatham Street old-clothes market,
notably, was said to be populated by “natty, blackbearded, fiercely mus-
tached” Jewish merchants out to cheat unwary shoppers, many of them
simple country folk.9 They were the first “New York Jews.”
It was in the “East European” period (ca. 1880–1924), when New York
absorbed the majority of the nearly two and a half million Jews, mainly
from Eastern Europe—the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and
8 Polland and Soyer, The Emerging Metropolis, 7, 13.
9 Polland and Soyer, The Emerging Metropolis, 10–11.