Introduction
In 1942, on the eve of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Salo W. Baron wondered how to make sense of enormous Jewish settlement concentrations in major cities, not least in New York:
Today probably over three million Jews, or nearly one-fifth of all world Jewry, live within one hundred miles of Times Square. There is an enormous difference between a Jewish community counting a few hundred or a few thousand members and the new gigantic agglomerations of Jews found in New York City or even in Chicago, Philadelphia, London, Moscow, Budapest and other great cities.1
Around 1940, over 80 percent of the approximately five million American Jews resided in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. With a Jewish population exceeding two million, Greater New York City was home to the largest urban concentration of Jews in the world. Jews had dispersed into three of New York’s five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx) but were concentrated in a few densely settled neighborhoods. They represented more than a quarter of the city’s population and, as Baron pointed out, a fifth of the world Jewish population, if nearby communities in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Greater Philadelphia were included. This was a remarkable proportion for members of a relatively small group who constituted about 3.7 percent of the American population in 1937. In fact, in 1940 only two countries—Poland and the Soviet Union—were home to Jewish populations larger than that of New York City. Other American cities with large Jewish populations were Chicago (300,000), Philadelphia (300,000), Detroit (100,000), and Boston (100,000). The Jewish population in smaller towns was almost negligible. Around 1940, less than 2 percent of American Jews lived in communities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants.2
In Europe, most Jews could also be found in a handful of major cities. By 1940 more than 75 percent of Britain’s 300,000 Jews had settled in London (230,000). Most others lived in just three cities: Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow. Other notable centers in Europe were Warsaw (350,000), Budapest (200,000), Lodz (200,000), Vienna (175,000–1938), Paris (175,000), and Berlin (100,000–1933). Four Soviet cities had Jewish populations of about 200,000: Kiev, Leningrad, Moscow, and Odessa. The single two cities beyond Europe and North America with more than 100,000 Jewish inhabitants were Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv. Even in Palestine, home to Zionist agricultural colonies, more than half of the Jewish population lived in three cities: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and Haifa. These numbers hide significant differences between advanced industrial and less developed economies. In Romania, one of the least developed countries in Europe, with only a single major city—the capital, Bucharest—the share of rural Jews was far higher than elsewhere.3
A closer look at the history of Jewish movement to cities in North America complicates the view, widely shared among scholars and the public, that “the” Jews were and are a “people of the city.”4 From the 1600s onward, Jews did indeed settle in disproportionate numbers in a few American port cities, but their number was hardly noticeable before the beginnings of mass immigration and urbanization during the middle decades of the 19th century. High urbanization rates for Jews in North America and Europe after 1800 were tied to several closely related processes that gained momentum during the 19th century: strong population growth, scientific and technological innovation, industrialization, mass migration and urbanization, and the integration of global markets for goods, services, and labor. Between 1850 and 1914, Irish, Polish, and Italian working-class immigrants settled primarily in the very same cities as Jewish immigrants. They also hailed from rural regions in Europe and started out in low-skilled industrial and service jobs.5 On the eve of World War II, the proportion of Jews living in cities in the United States greatly exceeded that of the general population. In the following two decades the gap narrowed. The expanding war economy pulled millions of Americans into industrial jobs in cities. Many were African Americans from the South who headed north. After hovering slightly above 50 percent between 1920 and 1940, the share of Americans living in cities and larger towns (including suburbs) increased to 64 percent in 1950 and almost 70 percent in 1960.6
A discussion of the demographic statistics and economic factors, however, fails to tell the whole story. American Jews, at no time a hom*ogeneous group, have consistently embraced the modern city across social and denominational lines. In contrast, prominent members of the political and social establishment in the United States such as Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed ambivalent or outright negative views about the city. For Jews who had been marginalized socially and economically for generations in different territories in Europe, new American cities symbolized freedom and opportunity. American Jews, ranging from trade union leaders to philanthropists, religious leaders, women’s rights activists, and politicians, have stood out as reformers who worked hard to improve living and working conditions in cities. It is hardly surprising that Americans who rejected urbanization often singled out Jews as symbolic antagonists or even resorted to crude anti-Semitic stereotypes. Indeed, the strong political affiliation of American Jews with political liberalism is partly influenced by their long commitment to the city.
Analyzing the history of the Jewish experience in American cities provides an intriguing perspective on the longue durée of urbanization, immigration, economic development, and mobility in colonial America and the United States. The movement of hundreds of thousands of Jews to American cities during the long 19th century also sheds light on a dramatic transformation of the global Jewish diaspora. In 1850, about 90 percent of the world Jewish population lived dispersed across Eastern Europe. A hundred years later, following the migration of more than two million Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States and other destinations between 1880 and the early 1920s, and after the shattering impact of the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of six million overwhelmingly Eastern European Jews, the main center of the Jewish diaspora shifted to the United States. In 1950 the more than five million American Jews represented about half of the world Jewish population. About 2.5 million lived in New York City and its suburbs alone. The newly founded State of Israel was home to approximately 1.5 million Jews in 1950 and only emerged as the second demographic center of the diaspora in the following decades.7
Almost all Jews who moved to North America before 1950 hailed from Europe. To better understand why Jews clustered in a few large American cities and why members of a group whose members for centuries were marginalized in European territories under Christian rule became an integral part of a rapidly transforming society but managed to persist as a distinctive group, it is necessary to devote attention to the cultural and social baggage Jewish migrants brought to America. A crucial question is how immigrants organized Jewish communal life in the unfamiliar setting of rapidly transforming industrial cities—in a country with almost no state interference in the religious sphere.
Before 1800
Salo Baron’s observation about the enormous number of Jews living in New York can be found in the introductory chapter of an ambitious study of Jewish communities before 1800. Baron (1895–1989) grew up in Tarnow, a small but expanding city in southern Poland that until 1918 belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1929 he was appointed to a chair in Jewish history at Columbia University. His 1942 study of Jewish communities was the fruit of years of research and augmented his reputation as a leading scholar of Jewish social and economic history. Baron grappled in particular with the question how self-governing Jewish communities encompassing almost all Jews in a given place managed to persist for centuries in varied and changing political settings. It appears odd that he titled a study that hardly mentioned Jewish life in the Americas The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the American Revolution. The title indicates that Baron understood the far-reaching repercussions of the founding of the United States for the organization of Jewish communal life well beyond America’s shores, even though hardly any Jews lived in North America at the time of the Revolution.8
With the founding of the United States all Jewish men residing in the thirteen former British colonies acquired full citizenship rights at a time when no Jewish populations in other parts of the world were formally emancipated. The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution did not mention Jews, and this is one reason why few contemporaries recognized the far-reaching impact the separation of state and religion in the Constitution and its amendments had for Jews. Following the revolution, Jews who immigrated to the United States literally emancipated themselves as they stepped off the boat. Individual freedom, however, also implied the freedom to choose how to be Jewish—or not to be Jewish at all. Religious freedom paved the way for the rise of a new type of dynamic Jewish community based on congregationalism and voluntarism in the United States during the middle decades of the 19th century.9
Initially, the American Revolution hardly affected Jewish life. The few hundred American Jews belonged to several tiny communities, each centered around a single synagogue, in port cities along the eastern seaboard. They represented less than a tenth of a percent of the American population. However, once Jewish (and general) migration rates increased in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, small, tightly knit “synagogue communities” were transformed into loose local networks comprising congregations and secular associations. A majority of “indifferent” Jews did not affiliate, or did so only sporadically, with a congregation or Jewish association. The older “synagogue communities” resembled the European Jewish communities Baron examined in his study. To better understand why the rise of loosely networked Jewish communities in American cities marked a significant turning point in modern Jewish history, it is necessary to take a brief look at Jewish life in Europe before the French Revolution.10
Since the beginnings of Jewish settlement in Europe under Roman rule, all Jews in a specific village, town, or city belonged to a local kehillah, a tightly organized and semiautonomous Jewish community that has been described as a “state within a state.” The kehillah was run by wealthy merchants and encompassed one or more synagogues, collected taxes, cared for poor and ill Jews, and even had a court system that handled internal Jewish matters. Membership was obligatory. Before 1800, even the largest urban kehillot encompassed not more than a few hundred members because Jews were widely dispersed in smaller towns and villages, primarily in Eastern Europe. Apart from early modern Poland, where Jewish kehillot dispatched delegates to an overarching Jewish imperial assembly, different kehillot did not formally affiliate with each other and remained separate entities. In the early modern period Jews were not allowed to reside in most territories and cities in Western and Central Europe. They could not own land and were excluded from most occupations, including farming. Jewish men worked as itinerant peddlers who bought and sold used clothes, dry goods, and other small items, and, in some places, cattle and agricultural tools. A few worked as bakers, ritual butchers, or teachers.11
After 1500, several cities in Central Europe and Italy allowed small groups of Jews to permanently reside in clearly demarcated, isolated districts—so-called ghettos—within their walls. Before 1500, Jews had been tolerated in some cities but were unable to secure formal protections against violence and expulsions. Long seen as “medieval” symbols of Jewish oppression and isolation, ghettos actually were a modern institution and represented a symbolic turning point. Following a period of systematic expulsion and anti-Jewish violence during the medieval period, some cities formally admitted Jews, permitting them to retain an acceptable degree of difference. This was a noteworthy development for another reason as well. During the rise of absolutist monarchies, sovereign or semi-autonomous cities such as Venice and Frankfurt were incubators of modern forms of belonging, (partially) representative government, and republican statehood. At a time when feudal landownership tied the overwhelming majority of the Christian population almost literally to the land, cities symbolized freedom. Yet only few Christians and Jews were able to legally settle in Central European and Italian cities. Therefore, only a small number of Jews ever resided in actual ghettos. In Eastern Europe, home to more than 90 percent of Europe’s Jewish population, very few cities emerged during the early modern period. In most rural towns and settlements, Jews and Christians lived in close proximity to each other.12
Between 1500 and 1800 the conditions for Jewish life in Western Europe resembled those in North America and the Caribbean. Following expulsions during the medieval period, by 1500 hardly any Jews remained in Western Europe. In contrast to territories headed by Catholic rulers, Protestant cities in the Netherlands and England, as well as Dutch and English colonial settlements in the Americas, did not restrict Jewish settlement. Jews and Christians could settle in a city if they had the means to acquire a home, were able to support their families, and contributed to the city’s economy. Jews often lived next door to Christians. They had to look after their own poor, but they could practice their religion openly, could buy and sell land, and were not excluded from most occupations. During the 17th century Amsterdam emerged as a flourishing commercial hub with a notable Jewish presence. The first Jewish settlers who arrived in the 1580s were Sephardim (Hebrew for “Spanish”) who were descended from Jews who had been expelled in 1492 from territories under Spanish rule and, later, from Portugal. Many Sephardim were linked to extensive trade networks and some participated in the colonization of the Americas in the 1500s and 1600s. The established Sephardim in Amsterdam excluded relatively poor Jewish migrants from Central Europe, so-called Ashkenazim (Hebrew for “Germans”) who established their own distinct community. This pattern—the separation of Jews of different regional, cultural, and class backgrounds—later defined Jewish life in the United States after 1820.13
Jews were among the pioneering European settlers in North America. In 1654, following the Portuguese conquest of the Dutch colony in Recife, several Sephardim headed to the Dutch outpost in New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York after it fell under English control in 1664. At least one Ashkenazi Jew, Asser Levy from Vilna, also arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654. Other “port Jews”—a term that illustrates Jewish mobility and connectedness among cities on both sides of the Atlantic—settled in a few cities on the Eastern seaboard such as Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia. Most belonged to trading networks with links to the Caribbean, Western Europe, and the Mediterranean. In societies that depended on slavery, Jews, while understood to be different, were usually categorized as white. Indeed, some Jews were involved in the slave trade and quite a few owned slaves. In the Americas, Sephardic Jews did not exclude Ashkenazim, not least because the number of new arrivals remained small. In relatively isolated and small communities, maintaining the Jewish tradition was considered an essential obligation. Christian and socioeconomic stereotypes about Jews were widespread in colonial America and the early republic, in part because most Christians had never encountered actual Jews. Jews socialized with Christians, but marriages across religious lines and conversions were rare.14
In the history of colonial American cities Jews could easily be overlooked because their number was minuscule. But for Jews cities mattered greatly. Cities offered unique benefits for members of a small group tied to trade networks and committed to maintaining tightly knit communities and their religious tradition. Only a single Jewish community had emerged in New England before the Revolution. The Puritans imagined themselves as Israelites, depicting Boston as their new Jerusalem, but they did not welcome actual Jews into their midst. Catholics and Protestant dissenters also were not tolerated. Among the latter was Puritan theologian Roger Williams. After his expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635, Williams founded a new colony which became the nucleus of the Rhode Island colony. In a 1655 letter Williams stated that “papists [Catholics], protestants, Jews or Turks [Muslims]” should have the right to freedom of worship. In the 1670s, a Jewish community developed in Newport, Rhode Island. Boston remained the only major city on the eastern seaboard without a permanent Jewish community before 1800.15
In Dutch and British colonies along the East Coast and in the Caribbean, colonial officials tended not to meddle in the affairs of Jewish communities, in part because the number of Jews there was almost negligible. Jews were not formally emancipated, but they faced hardly any restrictions. Christian oaths excluded them from holding political office on the local level. One example illustrates the de facto civic equality Jews enjoyed before the American Revolution. In the British colonies, Jews and other religious minorities such as Catholics did not have the formal right of public worship. Yet in the 1690s Jews in New York began to hold services in a rented building in Mill Street (today South William Street). In 1730, they built a synagogue in the same street. Catholics, admittedly a larger group, faced more obstacles. The first Catholic church in New York was erected only in 1785—after the American Revolution.16
Rising Migration and Urbanization after 1820
An estimated 150,000 Jews immigrated to the United States between 1820 and 1880, primarily from rural regions in the German states and adjacent territories such as Alsace, Bohemia, the Prussian province of Posen, and, to a lesser extent, Russian Poland and central Lithuania. Some sojourned in England before moving across the Atlantic. Jews represented a relatively small part of the huge migration of German-speakers during the middle decades of the 19th century but were visible as leading figures of loosely organized German American communities in several American cities. The new arrivals completely reinvented Jewish life in the United States, home to not more than 3,000 Jews around 1820. Rising migration from Central Europe and the British Isles after the Napoleonic Wars was a corollary of industrialization, urbanization, and westward expansion. Most Jewish migrants settled in New York and other cities in the Middle Atlantic region. A significant number joined other Europeans and native-born internal migrants and headed west. Jews were among the pioneering settlers in new cities that developed in the American interior and on the West Coast during the first half of the 19th century.17
Most Jews who came to the United States after 1820 originated in tightly knit village communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Not surprisingly, they tried to reconstitute the kehilla model in America. In larger cities, these attempts quickly foundered as a growing number of migrants arrived after 1840. Many Jewish (and Christian) immigrants understood that they had left the constraints and obligations of state-supervised religious communities behind and had literally emancipated themselves by moving to the United States. They had entered a society where membership in religious bodies was voluntary and not regulated by the state—just as America entered a period of dramatic socioeconomic change.18
In 1846 a correspondent of the main German Jewish weekly depicted Jewish life in New York as an ethnic-social hierarchy—a consequence of strong immigration after 1820—referring to the established Sephardic Jews (“Portuguese”) and newer Ashkenazi arrivals:
It is easy to understand, that this mixture of many nations cannot come together. The Portuguese behaves like a nobleman among the Jews. . . . The Pole here is the dirtiest creature of all classes, and he is responsible for the derogatory use of the name “Jew.” . . . The German represents the majority among the Jews, he is efficient and knows how to assimilate to the conditions here.19
The German Jewish correspondent was hardly an impartial observer. Yet other sources also betray the emergence of a new model of organized Jewish life. Newly arriving immigrants separated along regional and social lines.
During the 1850s an even more divisive issue superseded regional origin. Like other religious groups, Jews argued over the appropriate response to the unprecedented social and economic upheaval associated with industrialization, urbanization, and mass migration. As traditional religious elites lost their sway, a growing number of Jews (and Christians) appeared to drift away from religious observance. Among recently arrived Jewish immigrants only a minority—probably less than a third—formally affiliated with a congregation. Already in the 1820s conflicts between traditionalists and reformers led to the breakup of several Jewish congregations. Newly arriving immigrants established Reform congregations that redefined the Jewish tradition and were fiercely opposed by other Jews who became known as Orthodox. The separation of Jews into different religious movements which themselves were marked by internal divisions mirrored the rise of different Protestant denominations in this period. In part to mitigate religious divisions, Jewish men and women formed a wide range of secular Jewish associations ranging from charitable bodies to fraternal societies.20
In 1859, when Chicago’s first Jewish congregation was rocked by a bitter conflict over reforms of the liturgy, Bernhard Felsenthal, who led the Reform faction, was emphatic: “Let us not fight, we are brothers! Let us separate!” For Felsenthal, “American Israelites” did not have to accept the directives of other Jews in the religious sphere. Unlike most Jews in Europe, American Jews could split and form new congregations but remain united outside of the synagogue, not least in charitable associations. The debate unfolded against the background of the rising conflict between southern and northern states. When Felsenthal and other Reform Jews broke away in the spring of 1861, only a few weeks before Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, the opponents of the split compared the newly founded Reform congregation with South Carolina, the first state that had formally declared its secession from the Union in December 1860. This example illustrates the bitterness of conflicts over religion. Felsenthal and several like-minded Reform Jews in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other cities fought attempts by Cincinnati rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise to organize an American Jewish religious synod comprising all Jews affiliated with a religious congregation, arguing that it interfered with religious freedom. In this period, the American Jewish model of independent local congregations with a democratic governance structure diverged from the situation in other countries where Jews retained elements of the traditional religious kehilla and often organized in national institutions under the leadership of chief rabbis.21
In some American cities such as Chicago, Jews responded to the fragmentation of Jewish life by organizing overarching welfare associations in the years before 1880. Chicago’s United Hebrew Relief Association (1859) resembled a kehilla but maintained strict neutrality in religious matters. Welfare associations provided support for poor Jews and coordinated fundraising for ambitious projects. Jewish hospitals were particularly important symbols of Jewish Gemeinschaft and civic engagement, reflecting the ongoing commitment to the Jewish tradition of assisting sick and destitute individuals. Jewish hospitals also served as a safeguard against conversions by Jews on their deathbeds. Unlike kehillot, American Jewish welfare associations were (and are) not hierarchically organized and have depended on continuous grassroots support. In the entrepôt of New York, against the background of large fluctuations in the numbers of newly arriving and departing Jews, Jews were unable to overcome divisions relating to different cultural backgrounds, religious differences, and class. Even though only a minority of Jews formally affiliated with a congregation, conversion and intermarriage rates remained low well into the 20th century. One reason was the importance most Jews, even those who identified as secular, attached to maintaining deep-rooted religious traditions and social norms. As immigration rates increased after the Civil War, there was no lack of marriage partners. Jewish immigrants from particular regions in Europe often settled in close proximity to one another. Before 1880, settlement concentrations were hardly visible to outsiders because the number of Jewish migrants was limited and their social and residential mobility was high.22
Until the early 21st century, scholars largely ignored internal Jewish migrations before 1945 and Jewish life in small towns. During the second half of the 19th century, Jewish immigrants frequently spent years on the move in rural America. More than two-thirds of Jews in Central Europe worked as peddlers during the early 19th century. Most started out in the same occupation in America. Some peddlers used a larger city as their base; others settled in rural towns in the South and Midwest, moving frequently. Their main goal was to accumulate enough capital for a store, often in a small town or city. Since Jews sometimes struggled to organize a minyan—the ten men required to conduct a religious service—the synagogue community model often persisted in small towns. Eventually most migrants relocated to larger cities and launched businesses, usually by partnering with close relatives (often brothers) and acquaintances from the old country. Rising Jewish immigration after 1880 revived struggling small-town communities but most dissolved in the decades after World War II.23
Jewish immigrants from Central Europe represented a relatively small group in numerical terms by comparison with other German-speakers and the Jews who succeeded them, but their economic footprint was substantial. Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs were prominently represented in the garment sector, in retail and wholesale, and in finance—but also in mining and meat processing. The rags-to-riches careers that led to the rise of major businesses such as Levi’s Jeans, the huge Chicago mail order firm Sears Roebuck, prominent department stores (Gimbels, Macy’s), pioneering investment banks (Goldman Sachs; Kuhn, Loeb and Co.), and the mining fortunes of the Guggenheim family also shed light on the question of why almost all Jews from Central Europe settled in larger cities. For generations, Jews were relegated to the proto-capitalist margins of feudal economies in Central Europe. Jewish peddlers repaired and sold used clothes and traded in other dry goods, but they also sold cattle and agricultural tools. Experience with shifting markets, specific economic niches such as the cattle or clothing trade, changing fashions, and risk and failure, as well as access to internal credit networks, were important but location and timing also mattered greatly. Most Central European Jews moved to North America before and shortly after the Civil War. In its formative period, the new urban-industrial economy offered a wide range of opportunities for nimble immigrant entrepreneurs eager to embrace them.24
The remarkable economic success of mid-century Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs was not lost on critics of capitalism and the modern city. In an influential 1911 study, German sociologist Werner Sombart presented Jews as quintessential capitalists, associating them with the rise of cities, with a rootless spirit, and with greed. The book had much appeal, not least among German Zionists who also saw capitalism and the industrial city negatively because they promoted the agricultural colonization of a Jewish “homeland.” A translation of Sombart’s study, omitting some of the most blatantly anti-Semitic passages in the German original, was published in the United States in 1913. A close reading of the text reveals that Sombart’s argumentation was deeply flawed. As sociologist Ira Katznelson has convincingly argued, Sombart traced Jewish economic behavior to a supposed “propensity” of Jews as a group, devoting only limited attention to individual “agency.” Sombart also underestimated the constraints and opportunities presented by various political, social, and economic settings, and he ignored the decisive role of families in the history of 19th century Jewish entrepreneurship. Historian Jerry Z. Muller has pointed out that Sombart’s text incorporates notions of romantic conservatism and “anticapitalist communitarianism” popular with anti-Semitic ideologues.25
Self-made Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs eagerly overcame their outsider status and dispelled widespread anti-Jewish stereotypes. They were prominent civic reformers and philanthropists who generously endowed not only universities, public libraries, and art museums but also hospitals and parks. Some ran for public office—for instance, German-born businessman Adolph Sutro, who served as San Francisco’s second Jewish mayor between 1894 and 1896. Unlike most Irish and German-speaking immigrants, whose social mobility was lower, wealthy Jews could and did move to upscale neighborhoods in cities such as New York and Philadelphia after the Civil War. In the 1870s, members of the Protestant business establishment in New York and other cities on the East Coast began to exclude upwardly mobile Jews from their social sphere. Private clubs, resorts, and certain hotels informally and in some cases openly excluded Jewish members or guests. In newer cities in the Midwest and West, where most members of the economic and political establishment were newcomers, the bar for inclusion for Jews and other whites was lower. In contrast, Chinese, Japanese, and African American migrants remained subject to discrimination and violence.26
Rise of “Mega-Shtetls”
Before 1850 more than 90 percent of the world Jewish population lived dispersed in Eastern Europe, primarily in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and in southeastern Europe. While all Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were fully emancipated in 1867, the authorities in the Russian Empire imposed economic restrictions and settlement bans on Jews. Until the late 20th century most scholars traced rising Jewish migration in the early 1880s to a wave of violent pogroms in the southern provinces of the Russian Empire. While fear of persecution cannot be dismissed as a motive, the migration of Jews and their Christian neighbors to industrial cities in and beyond Eastern Europe was driven primarily by economic and demographic pressures. After the early 1860s, railroad networks gradually expanded into Eastern Europe, connecting the region with globally integrating markets for labor, services, and goods. Easier access to, and exchange of, information also played a role.27
The early phase of this economic transformation deprived Jewish peddlers and service providers of the niches they had occupied for generations, forcing them to look for opportunities elsewhere. Most Jewish (and non-Jewish) migrants were tied to networks encompassing families and close acquaintances from a specific place. Relatives and friends helped to secure jobs and funded journeys with prepaid tickets. Migrants often knew they would encounter challenging housing and working conditions in American cities. Younger men and women in particular sought to escape an increasingly hopeless existence on the margins of stagnating rural economies in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires that were barely able to sustain strongly growing populations. So they emigrated, seeking better opportunities in American cities. Approximately one-third of the Jewish population in Eastern Europe departed between 1880 and 1914, primarily to American cities. An even larger group moved within Eastern Europe, often to industrializing centers in the vicinity of rural towns.28
Between 1880 and 1914 over two million Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe settled in the United States. Remigration rates were not negligible but probably did not exceed 10 percent. In combination with natural growth, the immigration pushed the number of American Jews from an estimated 250,000 in 1880 to over three million by 1920. A combination of factors explains why two-thirds of the post-1880 migrants settled in just three cities: New York (including Brooklyn), Philadelphia, and Chicago. These three centers were the largest American cities before 1914 and home to rapidly expanding industrial and service sectors which depended on a continuous supply of cheap immigrant labor. It is not surprising that other migrants who arrived in growing numbers after 1880, not least southern Italians, headed to the same cities. Many Jews (and non-Jews) found work within the so-called ethnic economy. Most owners of sweatshops and small garment businesses were themselves recently arrived Jewish migrants. Other immigrants hired family members to work in small stores. The need to provide kosher food for tens of thousands of Jews created job opportunities. Immigrants organized internal support networks. On New York’s Lower East Side, dozens of small banks organized by Jewish and Italian migrant families catered to the respective communities, often assisting in the funding of journeys across the Atlantic.29
About a third of the post-1880 Jewish immigrants moved to other American cities. The example of the industrial hub Cleveland illustrates the transformative impact of the Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. Between 1880 and 1920 Cleveland’s Jewish population expanded from less than 5,000 to 75,000, contributing to the growth of Cleveland’s overall population from 160,000 to 800,000. Jewish urban communities outside the United States also experienced dramatic growth between 1880 and 1920, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Migrant networks explain the strong preference of Jews and others for locations that already had attracted migrants from the same region. The rise of the South African mining center Johannesburg illustrates this point. The city was founded in the wake of a gold rush in 1886. A majority of the c. 20,000 Jews who lived in Johannesburg in 1914 can be traced to a migrant network from a few neighboring towns in the vicinity of Kovno (Kaunas) in central Lithuania. Unprecedented urban settlement concentrations were interfaces in an emerging network of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the globe and catalysts for new forms of Jewish sociability.30
The economic profile of Jewish migrants contributed to high urbanization rates. Like the earlier Jewish migrants from Central Europe, Jews in Eastern Europe had been excluded for generations from farming and most other occupations in rural economies. Most men had worked as peddlers or as informal service providers. The loss of economic niches pulled many to industrializing cities. By 1880, however, most lucrative opportunities for mobile micro-entrepreneurs with little capital had vanished, forcing most post-1880 immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe—both Jews and Christians—to look for employment in the industrial sector. Non-Jewish Eastern Europeans worked as miners, steelworkers, in construction, and as farmers. Jewish women and men found jobs in the garment industry and related sectors. Many Jews also started out as peddlers or set up small businesses, often retail stores. A small number of post-1880 Jewish immigrants also moved to small towns where they often settled in close proximity to other Eastern Europeans. In some mining towns—for instance, in Johnstown in Pennsylvania—immigrant Jewish store owners and innkeepers served Polish miners much as they had done in early 19th-century Poland.31
New Ghettos?
Like other European and Asian immigrants, Jews flocked to ethnic neighborhoods, often renting overcrowded apartments in dilapidated tenement buildings in proximity to sweatshops and small factories. In 1910 approximately one million Jews lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in Harlem, in parts of the Bronx, and in Brooklyn. In Chicago, most Jewish immigrants settled on the city’s West Side; in Philadelphia, on the southern periphery of the city center, close to Italians and other Eastern Europeans. Recent arrivals formed hundreds of self-help associations that became known as Landsmanshaftn (hometown associations). These protected their members, provided assistance to struggling communities back home, and were closely tied to the migration process. The Jewish tradition of self-help also helps to explain why crime rates were low. These neighborhoods contained a large number of small synagogues and prayer rooms. According to an estimate only slightly more than 10 percent of American Jews were affiliated with a religious congregation in 1916. Yet these numbers do not include informal members. In 1905 at least 350 Orthodox and Hasidic synagogues catered to the approximately 350,000 Jewish inhabitants of the Lower East Side.32
In his 1896 novella Yekl, journalist Abraham Cahan described New York’s Lower East Side as one of the “most densely populated spots on the face of the earth—a seething human sea fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centers of Europe.” Cahan, a rising figure in New York’s Yiddish newspaper scene and an immigrant from Lithuania, wrote the novella in English to counter widespread stereotypes about Jewish immigrants among established Jews and other Americans. He highlighted the challenges, temptations, and tensions average immigrants faced in the workplace and at home. In the public discourse Jewish immigrants were perceived as a hom*ogenous group. Cahan emphasized their diverse backgrounds. Jews on the Lower East Side came “from every nook and corner of Russia, Poland, Galicia, Hungary, Roumania; Lithuanian Jews, Volhynian Jews, south Russian Jews, Bessarabian Jews; Jews crowded out of the ‘pale of Jewish settlement’; Russified Jews expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kieff, or Saratoff.” The Lower East Side was “a human hodgepodge with its component parts changed but not yet fused into one hom*ogeneous whole.” Cahan’s description foreshadows the melting pot concept that Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill would popularize in a 1908 play of the same title.33
Established Jews were concerned about the visibility of Jewish immigrant settlement concentrations, in part because they associated increasing Jewish immigration with rising anti-Jewish discrimination. They failed to grasp the diverse backgrounds of the immigrants and assumed (falsely) that immigrants were isolating themselves to preserve their religious and social traditions. During the 1890s, established and immigrant Jews, the press, and other observers began using the term “ghetto” for Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, even though these had almost nothing in common with early modern ghettos. The transfer of the term can be traced to the debate about Jewish emancipation in Central Europe during the middle decades of the 19th century. Modernizing Jews in the German states applied “ghetto” to the period before 1800 but also projected the concept onto Jewish life in contemporary Eastern Europe where most Jews had not been emancipated and traditional Judaism remained dominant. “Ghetto” was an ambivalent metaphor expressing Jewish authenticity and nostalgic notions of Gemeinschaft, but also degeneration, poverty, and isolation.34
In 1893, a few days after the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago opened its gates, Reform rabbi Joseph Stolz lamented the rise of traditional Judaism and the prevalence of the “jargon” (Yiddish) among Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s West Side: “They pray as they always did, they retain the miserable jargon they brought with them. . . . I see no possibility of breaking up that ghetto . . . nothing but a fire, a flood, or a cyclone can wipe it out of existence.” In New York, Chicago, and other cities established Jews joined progressive reformers and launched Americanization programs, especially schools and settlement houses, where immigrants could learn English and acquire useful skills. Some immigrants were even dispatched to agricultural colonies in isolated parts of the American West and South. The overarching goal was to disperse the immigrants, boost their assimilation through education, and turn them into self-sufficient and productive Americans through job training programs. Not surprisingly, the paternalistic approach of most Americanization projects limited their reach. Almost all agricultural colonies dissolved after a couple of years. Most newly arriving immigrants shaped and adapted to American society on their own terms. Unlike established Jews, they were less exposed to anti-Semitic discrimination because most rarely ventured beyond relatively sheltered urban immigrant neighborhoods.35
Americanization, agricultural colonization, and other dispersal schemes also reflected sincere efforts by established Jews to mitigate agitation by supporters of immigration restrictions who were influenced by anti-Semitic stereotypes. Nativists focused on Jews as quintessential strangers who were unable to perform physical labor and were thus tied to “unproductive” work in cities. Along with other immigrants who were caricatured in racialized terms, Jews were blamed for the ills of urbanization, notably crime, left-wing political radicalism, corruption, exploitation, and isolation in urban “ghettos.” Like anti-Semites in Europe who portrayed Jews as the destroyers of a romanticized rural order, many American nativists detested the modern city and promoted an idealized vision of a preindustrial period of tranquility and social order. By 1910, Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox Christians were the majority in major American industrial centers. Nativists promoted immigration restrictions as a defensive measure to preserve “old-stock,” Protestant, and white American society and regain political control of cities.36
New York eugenicist Madison Grant, a pioneering environmentalist and co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, was one of the most influential promoters of what today is known as “replacement theory.” In his widely read 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, which borrowed heavily from the works of notorious Anglo-German anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he popularized the idea that race was biologically determined. He depicted New York as a “cloaca gentium” (sewer of [different] nations). In the destructive environment of the industrial city, members of the “Nordic blond” race who needed “exercise, meat, and air . . . cannot live under Ghetto conditions”—in contrast to members of “Mediterranean” races. Grant considered Jews particularly threatening because they passed as “white.” In one of the most notorious passages of the book, Grant claimed that “Polish Jews” were “exterminating” the “old-stock” American race:
[The] man of the old stock . . . is today being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women.
Stereotypes associating Jews with corruption, urban vice, and political radicalism were already widespread in late 19th-century America. Grant’s pseudo-scientific essay marked a shift because he provided anti-Semitism with a degree of respectability among the American political establishment and the eugenics movement.37
Cultural and class differences between established Jews and recent immigrants gave rise to influential concepts reflecting divisions in the urban space. The terms “uptown Jews” and “downtown Jews” illustrated the social divide between economically successful mid-century migrants with residences on Manhattan’s Upper East and West Sides and recent working-class immigrants on the Lower East Side. Yet not all Jews in Uptown Manhattan belonged to the affluent business establishment. Already in the 1880s Harlem attracted thousands of Jewish immigrants, while others moved to Brooklyn. The widely used epithets “Germans,” “Poles,” and “Russians” reflected contested perceptions of other Jews, taking on shifting meanings that were much more an expression of social status and economic success in America than indicators of actual origins in a certain region in Europe. Interviews conducted by urban sociologist Louis Wirth with Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Chicago in the 1920s prove this point. In the early 1920s immigrants began leaving the West Side “ghetto” for the more upscale Lawndale neighborhood on the city’s western outskirts. Among Jews in the “ghetto” Lawndale was known in Yiddish as “Deutschland” (Germany). The “Deitchuk” (German) was associated with assimilation, upward social mobility, and a lack of religious observance.38
In 1908–1909 Jews of different social and religious backgrounds, Zionists, and members of the affluent business establishment came together to form an American-style kehilla in New York. The trigger was the allegation by the city’s police commissioner Thomas A. Bingham that half of all criminals in New York were Jewish. Jewish leaders realized that a concerted effort was needed to refute such absurd accusations. Members of the affluent business establishment supported the kehilla to retain some control over newly arriving immigrants. Recently immigrated Orthodox Jews wanted to safeguard the religious tradition. The possible dissolution of Jewish life in the modern city concerned most Jewish leaders who backed the kehilla, regardless of their origin and religious orientation. Due to widely diverging interests and a lack of grassroots support the project never gained real momentum and was dissolved in 1922. The enormous number of Jews of diverse backgrounds and high mobility among neighborhoods in an expanding city hampered efforts to build an organized community. Sociologist Daniel Elazar has argued that in the exceptional setting of a city with more than one million Jewish inhabitants no compelling need existed to form a Jewish umbrella organization. The city simply offered an unparalleled range of possibilities to organize and identify as Jewish. Moreover, as a result of strong immigration Jews of different backgrounds in New York (and other cities) represented sizeable voting blocks and exerted influence at the ballot box.39
Move to the Suburbs
In the aftermath of World War I, Congress severely limited the immigration of non-whites and non-Protestants. In the 1920 federal election rural Americans, who were overwhelmingly Protestant and white, embraced the isolationist message that associated immigrants with the rise of violent and corrupt cities controlled by ethnic politicians, as well as with political radicalism and racial transformation. Legislation passed in 1921 and 1924 with strong bipartisan support cut immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as from Africa and Asia, to almost negligible levels. Anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, racism, and a deep distrust of the modern city strongly influenced lawmakers. American Jewish leader Louis Marshall, who along with other prominent Jews lobbied for years against immigration restrictions, sharply condemned the 1924 bill as anti-Semitic and racist, explicitly pointing to the “phrasemonger” Madison Grant as one of the bill’s spiritual authors. The restrictive immigration bills boosted internal migration, especially from the South. Already during the war growing numbers of African Americans had left the Jim Crow South for industrial jobs in northern cities.40
Already before World War I Jews in most cities had organized autonomous federations that provided a wide range of social services and coordinated their activities with secular and religious institutions. Among the most visible projects were Jewish hospitals. Meanwhile, Jews moved into white collar jobs or were employed as skilled workers; others owned small stores. Observant Jews in the cities left Orthodox shuls (synagogues) for a more modern and American movement: Conservative Judaism tried to steer a middle course between traditional and modern Judaism. Influenced by Catholic parishes, Conservative and some Reform congregations promoted the idea of synagogue centers which included basketball courts, pools, and a wide range of social activities for Jews of all ages. The Great Depression hit urban Jewish communities hard. For the first time, Jewish communal organizations could not provide support to all struggling families and individuals. The crisis also created the conditions for new forms of Jewish sociability. Many younger Jews struggling to find work attended college.41
In the aftermath of World War II two closely related internal migrations dramatically reshaped Jewish life in the United States. In the wake of a postwar economic boom, the American-born children and grandchildren of post-1880 immigrants—along with descendants of Christian immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe—left ethnic neighborhoods for suburbs surrounding New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities such as Boston. A growing number of Jews moved further, to sprawling Sun Belt cities, in particular Greater Los Angeles, and to Miami and its suburbs. These internal migrations led to the decline of Orthodox Judaism and reinvigorated Conservative and Reform Judaism.42
In the postwar period, public expressions of anti-Semitism gradually declined (but did not disappear), and American Jews (and Catholics) were accepted as part of the social and cultural mainstream. Nevertheless, Jewish families still faced informal restrictions in urban and suburban housing markets in the 1940s and 1950s, and Jewish organizations and politicians cooperated with African Americans to push for the passage of fair housing laws. Jewish politicians also found growing acceptance beyond ethnic lines. The relatively late election of New York’s first Jewish mayor, Abraham Beame, in 1973 reflects not a lack of acceptance but political divisions among Jewish voters. In the same year one of the first openly gay politicians in the United States, Harvey Milk, ran for the position of San Francisco city supervisor on a liberal platform. Milk was born in New York and served in the navy in the early 1950s. He lost the 1973 election but emerged as a leading political spokesperson of the city’s gay community. Milk was assassinated in 1978, a year after he was elected supervisor for the Castro district.43
After the Holocaust two Brooklyn neighborhoods became the spiritual center of Hasidic Judaism. It is estimated that in the early 21st century Crown Heights and Williamsburg were home to approximately 100,000 Hasidim affiliated with different sects. Strictly observant Haredi (Hebrew for “ultra-Orthodox”) Jews reject the modern city and secular culture. The seemingly paradoxical growth of urban Haredi communities, especially of Hasidic sects in postwar New York, has been traced to several factors ranging from access to highly specialized economic niches to frequent encounters with other, often secular Jews whose presence and seeming ignorance or rejection of the Jewish tradition reinforces the strictly observant premise of Hasidic sects. Smaller Haredi communities also emerged in other American cities—for instance in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood. Since the 1960s small groups of Hasidim have established tightly knit communities in rural areas north of New York.44
The migration to the suburbs and Sun Belt cities led to the rise of new centers of Jewish population. By 1980 southeast Florida (with 300,000 Jews) and Greater Los Angeles (with 500,000) had overtaken Chicagoland (250,000) and Greater Philadelphia (300,000). Other growing centers were the San Francisco Bay Area (100,000), Greater Washington, DC (160,000), and Greater Boston (200,000). By 2008 Greater Phoenix and Greater Denver each were home to over 80,000 Jews, Atlanta and its suburbs to over 100,000. As of 2015, the San Francisco Bay Area had grown to c. 400,000, southeast Florida to 500,000, Greater Washington, DC, to 200,000, and Greater Boston to 250,000. Meanwhile, Greater New York’s population had declined to approximately 1.5 million and Greater Philadelphia’s to 200,000. Metropolitan Chicago’s Jewish population had increased slightly, to 270,000.45
These statistics reflect the transformation of the American economy and society during the second half of the 20th century. A strong commitment to education and the pursuit of opportunities during the postwar boom years propelled most American Jews into the suburban middle class, where many work in the medical profession, in law, in financial services, and as academics. The information technology revolution, the expansion of a sophisticated service sector, and expanding universities pulled many Jewish and other middle-class Americans to new centers, not least to the San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Boston, and, more recently, Seattle and Austin. Among their neighbors and coworkers are highly skilled immigrants from South and East Asia who benefitted from the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965. Immigrants from Latin America fill niches in the formal and informal service sector once occupied by Jews and other post-1880 immigrants.46 Jews have clustered in certain suburbs, for instance in Shaker Heights near Cleveland, in northern New Jersey, and in the Boston suburb of Newton. However, even suburban neighborhoods with a strong Jewish presence were and remain ethnically and religiously mixed—and have experienced continuous change. One example is the northern Chicago suburb of Skokie. In the 1970s Jews represented a majority of Skokie’s 75,000 residents. Today, Skokie still has a substantial Jewish presence but is home to a diverse population that includes a growing number of Asian Americans and Hispanics.47
Fears that the suburbanization of Jews would serve as a catalyst for the dissolution of Jewish life were as misplaced as concerns expressed by traditional Jewish leaders and Zionists about Jewish urbanization around 1900. A not insignificant number of Jews did not leave cities such as New York or Chicago but moved internally. Metropolitan federations expanded into the suburbs, and suburban Jews remained strongly committed to the cultural life and social welfare of the core cities in each region. As older symbols of Jewish unity and civic commitment have lost their appeal, metropolitan Jews identified new causes. For instance, after the 1950s urban Jewish hospitals, which had long enjoyed support from a wide range of Jewish groups, could not be sustained because of exploding costs. Today, Jewish museums, Holocaust commemoration, a variety of Israel-related activities, and academic Jewish Studies programs serve as foci for Jewish involvement. After World War II Jewish intermarriage rates did increase strongly. According to a 2013 study by the Pew Research Center, more than 40 percent of married Jewish respondents indicated their spouse was not Jewish. However, many children whose parents have different religious backgrounds have been raised Jewish. Growing intermarriage also explains why conversions to Judaism have increased. Indeed, rising intermarriage reflects the growing social acceptance and inclusion of Jews in postwar America.48
Already before World War II Jews in New York and Los Angeles made a growing impact on popular American culture. The Broadway stage, radio, television, and the Hollywood movie industry owe much to the acumen, creativity, and innovation of Jewish writers, performers, directors, producers, and business owners. The Jewishness of American humor is widely acknowledged. The city did not just provide the conditions for fascinating cultural innovations. In the postwar era Jewish writers, literary critics, photographers, and journalists played prominent roles in shaping the image of the American city well beyond the United States. The movement of Jews and other descendants of post-1880 immigrants to the suburbs coincided with the ethnic revival of the 1960s. Growing nostalgia for Jewish authenticity is reflected not least by the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered in 1964 and became one of the longest-running productions in Broadway history, attracting large audiences of Jews and non-Jews alike. The success of Fiddler on the Roof was a proud acknowledgement of Jewish belonging in America. In the late 1960s the Lower East Side in New York was rediscovered as a symbolic and almost generic site of American Jewish origins that has featured widely in popular culture.49
In recent decades, aging Jewish communities in cities such as Chicago and Miami have revived as a diverse set of migrants has arrived and large corporations have relocated their headquarters from suburbs to city centers. Jewish college graduates, professionals, academics, and recent immigrants from Israel, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America have settled in gentrifying neighborhoods in close proximity to the respective urban cores. Jewish life in sprawling cities such as Los Angeles has flourished in ways few could have imagined in the immediate postwar years. The rise of air travel, cable television, and social media has enabled Jews and other groups to redefine Gemeinschaft and maintain links across and beyond continents. The expansion of direct flights from major American cities to Tel Aviv in the early 21st century illustrates the close links between major metropolitan centers on both coasts (as well as Chicago) and the highly urbanized State of Israel. Greater New York remains the symbolic center of American Jewish life, even though most Jews have dispersed to other metropolitan areas. The hugely popular sitcom Seinfeld, which celebrates the Jewishness of New York, was filmed almost entirely in Southern California.50 The astounding range and diversity of Jewish secular and religious groups, from Haredi communities to congregations comprising LGBTQ members and some Reform congregations accepting as members spouses who are not Jewish, has become a distinctive feature of Jewish life in the United States. Another difference between Jews in the United States and those elsewhere is the limited sway of national Jewish organizations in the US, a testament to the preeminent role of loosely networked Jewish life on the local level.
Conclusion
From the earliest days of colonial settlement American cities have accommodated diverse groups of people on the move. American cities were inclusive for Jews, albeit not to the same degree for other groups such as Chinese immigrants and African Americans. Jews strongly identified with their adopted American cities and invested considerable social and cultural capital in making them better places. Immigrant communities in cities provided protection and social support, allowing Jewish newcomers to maintain distinctive cultural and religious traditions. In American cities members of small groups could and did organize and exert political influence, often by building coalitions across ethnic and social lines. The Jewish embrace of the modern city has made a lasting impact on American culture, especially in the period after World War II. In the American city Jews of strikingly different backgrounds represent an essential and distinctive part of the constantly changing American mosaic.
Discussion of the Literature
American Jewish history remains strongly committed to the ethno-religious paradigm. Few authors use comparative approaches. The experience of Jews in other countries (with the partial exception of Israel) does not figure prominently in works about American Jewish history. Canadian Jewish history, for instance, remains a separate field of study constrained by limitations similar to those of its larger counterpart south of the 49th parallel. Not surprisingly, some of the most influential works in American Jewish history deal with Jewish life in the city, especially in New York.
Before the 1950s most scholars who researched Jewish life in the urban setting were social scientists. The earliest studies were compiled by members of Jewish welfare associations who provided a wide range of social programs for recent immigrants. A pioneering work is the 1905 survey The Russian Jew in the United States, edited by social worker Charles Seligman Bernheimer.51 During the middle decades of the 20th century Jews figured prominently as subjects of study for authors of general studies of the modern American city. Between the 1910s and 1930s the Chicago School of Sociology focused on Jews as trailblazers of urbanization. In contrast to anti-Semites and nativists, Chicago sociologists such as William I. Thomas, Robert Park, and Park’s student Louis Wirth embraced pluralism and diversity in America. Since they could draw on only a limited range of works about Jewish life in pre-1800 Europe, they tended to essentialize characteristics of Jewish behavior and paid limited attention to the diverse background of Jewish migrants.52
Jews and other immigrants have strongly identified with their adopted cities. An early expression of local pride are so-called ethnic histories that were published in the early 1900s. These beautifully designed and richly illustrated volumes contain the biographies of major movers and shakers of the respective communities (who often funded their publication) and highlight the achievements of each specific group—at a time when official histories largely ignored immigrants. Ethnic histories tended to focus on the business establishment and devoted little or no attention to working-class Jews who made up the bulk of the Jewish population in larger cities.53 Local Jewish history experienced a renaissance in the 1960s. Independent scholars, often affiliated with local Jewish historical societies, and genealogists have been conducting and publishing extensive research about Jewish life in most major metropolitan areas.54 Strong local identities and the enduring interest in Jewish history explain why the legacy of the older ethnic histories continues to influence scholarship. Some recently published local surveys of Jewish history resemble ethnic histories and target Jewish readers with ties to the relevant community rather than scholarly audiences.55
Academic historians turned to the American Jewish experience in the city in the 1960s—not coincidentally at the very time when most American Jews were leaving older cities for the suburbs and Sun Belt cities. Moses Rischin’s The Promised City (1962), about post-1880 Jewish immigrants in New York, became a model for similar studies of other immigrant groups. Rischin portrayed Jewish immigrants in New York as successful masters of their own destiny. The study made extensive use of Yiddish sources.56
The establishment of Jewish Studies programs at research universities after the 1960s provided a boost to academic scholarship on large groups in American society that had long been marginalized, namely immigrants, African Americans, non-Protestants, and women. The rise of social history in this period transformed American urban history and American Jewish history. In the 1960s and 1970s Jewish sociologists led by Marshall Sklare and Daniel Elazar conducted extensive research on Jews in American metropolitan areas and helped to establish Jewish social studies as an academic subfield.57
Following a major expansion of scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s, it is indeed challenging to survey the continuously expanding body of work on Jews in New York and other American cities. The history of Jewish life in colonial America has been extensively researched. Major gaps remain, especially in the 19th century, while the period of mass immigration after 1880 has been analyzed in great detail. Much of the contemporary scholarship on Jewish life in the urban setting focuses on the period after World War II. An impressive three-volume survey of Jews in New York that was compiled under the auspices of historian Deborah Dash Moore was published in 2012 and has provided a much-needed synthesis, especially for the 20th century. In marked contrast, surprisingly little has been written about Jewish life in other American cities. No recent study covers the history of Jewish life in Philadelphia since colonial times, nor does such a study exist for Los Angeles.58 After the 1980s historians and social scientists began to focus on memory and Jewish cultural production in the urban and suburban space.59 Jewish religion in the city has attracted growing attention.60 Jewish business history remains understudied, as does the history of inter-ethnic relations.61
Primary Sources
Scholars researching the Jewish experience in American cities can draw on a wealth of archival collections that are easily accessible. The largest archival collections for Jews in the United States can be found at the American Jewish Historical Society archive at the Center for Jewish History in New York and at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. Both archives hold the records of dozens of Jewish congregations and secular associations. Both institutions are making parts of their collections available on their websites. The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley, CA, serves as the most important depository for Western Jewish Americana.
In most metropolitan areas researchers can find material about Jewish life in local archives. Some regional (Jewish) historical societies and museums maintain collections about local Jewish history. A partial list can be found at the website of the Jewish History Resource Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Urban archives and research libraries—for instance, the Newberry Library in Chicago—and the libraries of most research universities contain material about Jewish communities in their respective cities or states. The libraries of rabbinical seminaries, notably those of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and Hebrew Union College (with campuses in New York, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles) also are important resources.
A major and impressive resource for Jewish life in the American city is literature and popular culture. Influential American writers have pondered the Jewish encounter with the modern city in their works: notable among these are Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. Many more could be listed here—for instance, the popular writer Chaim Potok, who focused on traditional Jews in the urban setting. Another important field is popular entertainment, ranging from the Yiddish stage and standup comedy to radio programs, independent and Hollywood studio movies, and television series. Several Jewish movie directors such as Sidney Lumet and Woody Allen have explicitly focused on Jews in New York, as have popular comedies such as The Goldbergs and Seinfeld. More recently, photography and material culture have attracted growing attention among anthropologists and historians. Apart from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, dozens of local Jewish museums are preserving objects related to the American Jewish experience in the modern city.
