American Jewish history – Page 2 – From Under the Fig Tree

Object lesson

joselitMarch 7, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In my household, Sundays are usually given over to two rituals: reading The New York Times and taking in a museum exhibition. I suspect your household is no different.

But, as I explained recently to a group of GW alumni who had come together on a rainy Sunday morning to visit the brand new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia as part of an alumni series called “GW Culture Buffs,” the mere thought of doing exactly what we were doing had once generated more than its fair share of controversy.

We take our Sundays-at-the-museum for granted; earlier generations of culture buffs did not. Many museum officials and their elite patrons were initially rather resistant to the idea of opening the doors of, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on a Sunday, fearful lest it attract the wrong kind of people—those with “vandal hands” or broken English. A Sunday at the Met, they warned, was a “perilous experiment.”

Metropolitan Museum button — Once upon a time, Met entry buttons were useless on a Sunday. Credit: Charley Lhasa/Flickr

Americans, especially Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side, didn’t see things quite that way and joined hands with socially conscious civic reformers to expand the franchise of museum-going by writing editorials in the Yiddish press and circulating petitions on the Jewish street.

Where America’s elite believed that visiting a museum was a privilege, Americans at the grass roots believed that it was a right, a perquisite of urban citizenship.

Were it not for the zealousness and passion with which they defended that belief, the nation’s museums would be grand, if empty, spaces.

True grit

joselitJanuary 19, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

The Coen Brothers' recently released cinematic homage to the cowboys and gunslingers of the Old West places squarely within our sights the centrality of masculinity to the making of modern America.

Boxing gloves — Flickr: Kristin Wall/ KWDesigns.

The pursuit of masculinity also loomed large within the precincts of the modern Jewish experience. Eager to supplant their traditional braininess with brawn, growing numbers of Jewish men in both the Old World and the New of the late 19th and 20th centuries forsook the yeshiva for the boxing ring and the baseball diamond.

Occasioning lots of commentary over the years, the transformation of the Jewish male has also been the subject of several hard-hitting contemporary documentaries. Over the course of the next few months GW's Program in Judaic Studies will partner with American University's Program in Jewish Studies to showcase three films that explore the relationship among brain, brawn and the Jewish male.

"Tough Guys," as we're calling the series, commences on Jan. 25 at 7 p.m., with a screening at American University of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (event details here). This profile of the legendary baseball player will be followed a few weeks later on Feb. 23 at 7 p.m. at American Unversity by a salute to prize-fighter Dmitriy Salita, whose boxing prowess along with his religiosity is explored in Orthodox Stance.

The series culminates on April 4 at 7 p.m. on GW's campus (Room 310, School of Media and Public Affairs) with a screening of Disturbing the Universe, an in-depth look at the career of legal tiger and brawler, William Kunstler, who had a fierce and fighting way with words.

Baseball, boxing, the law and Jewish men: Who can resist?

Roots

joselitDecember 28, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

For their final assignment, the students in my "Jewish Geography" class were asked to come up with a guidebook to some of the historic places they had explored over the course of the semester. Almost to a person, they made sure to include the Jewish farming communities of Woodbine, N.J., and Petaluma, Calif., on their itineraries.

Radishes. Creative commons Flickr image by Tamara Dunn

No matter how their guidebooks were cast -- places to avoid; places to seek out; places that spoke of possibility; places that spoke of loss -- Woodbine and Petaluma were on virtually everyone's list.

The runaway popularity of these two farming colonies among GW undergrads might have to do, in part, with the way the particulars of their history run counter to standard notions of the modern Jewish experience. Doctors, lawyers, accountants and professors are a familiar bit of business. But farmers in the family? What a novelty!

The students' affinity for Woodbine and Petaluma might also have to do, I suspect, with the growing appeal of farming, which over the past few years has gone from being an artifact of America's past into a beacon of its future. On college campuses across the country, farming is now chic.

Whatever its rationale, heightened interest in the history of American Jewish farmers is welcome news. In that connection, those who'd like to learn more, or who have farming stories to share, should be in touch with Scott Hertzberg, himself a vegetable farmer from Prince George's County, Md., who is currently assembling a website on Jewish farming in America.

As Malka Heifetz Tussman, one of my favorite poets, would have it, drawing freely on metaphors of the soil in her poem, "Cellars and Attics":

…Children should know where
They come from.

'Yes,' I say.
Children are not radishes.
Children have deep roots.

Mudslinging

joselitNovember 8, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Right on the heels of last week's post about the relationship of Jews and capitalism comes this cold dose of historical reality: Henry Ford's claim that the Jews controlled the Federal Reserve Board.

I had known, of course, that the automobile tycoon was no friend of the Jews, but I was unaware that his antipathy ran so deep. But now, thanks to the research of my student Jonathan Robinson, a GW political science major with a keen eye for historical detail, I'm all the wiser.

Over the course of the early 1920s, Ford had spilled a lot of ink railing against the Jews for their embrace of modernity. From his perspective, they had polluted the morals of the nation's young by introducing them to the movies and to jazz.

By 1926, his animus in full bloom, America's leading industrialist went on to charge the Jews with playing fast and footloose with the nation's economy as well. "The international Jew is in direct control of all financial centres of government, including the United States Federal Reserve System," he categorically declared.

Ford's claim so enraged Congressman Sol Bloom of New York that he publicly demanded that the manufacturer support them with hard and cold facts, even going so far as to suggest that he appear before Congress to give a full accounting of himself.

"Mr. Ford," said Mr. Bloom, "is a public man. When he speaks he has a national audience." Besides, his net worth is greater than that of the United States Treasury. His remarks cannot go unchallenged.

Not surprisingly, Ford declined the invitation. But his allegations, his casual relationship to the truth, live on, a testament to the ways in which -- then, as now -- innuendo is the coin of the realm.

Naming names

joselitOctober 26, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Who among us doesn't have a relative whose name was changed at Ellis Island? Rare, indeed, is the American Jew whose surname is the same as that of his or her European and Israeli cousins. Normative rather than exceptional, the immigrant's acquisition of a new name seems to be as American a phenomenon as, well, apple pie.

But now, in an article published by Dara Horn in Azure magazine, we're told that the changing-of-the-name is itself a bube mayse, an urban legend, a fabrication of the immigrant mind. It simply didn't happen, or, if it did, these flights of onomastic invention took place well before Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe even came to the New World. By Horn's lights, name change had little, if anything, to do with tone deaf inspectors at Ellis Island.

"Ellis Island Medical Exam." Flickr creative commons photo by jjprojects.

In an imaginative and extended riff, Horn not only denies the historicity of name changing but also claims that the whole thing, from start to finish, is a tall tale of expiation, projection and apology. Having so readily turned their backs on the Old World in their eagerness to become one with the New, Jewish immigrants, she claims, made the whole thing up. It's all one big mea culpa for our sins.

"By inventing a story that depicts their name change as beyond their control ... these immigrants sent a powerful message to future generations: I did not shed my Jewish identity intentionally. And despite the values of the country in which we are living I hope that you won't, either," she writes.

When I shared the latest news with my students, they were taken aback, even baffled. And not just baffled. Suddenly they were cast adrift, floating free of family stories that had once anchored them. Only a few days earlier, one of my students had written lovingly and at great length about how his great grandfather's name had been changed by an official at Ellis Island, and now he was being told that his forbear had made it all up. Who to believe? Dara Horn or grandpa?

The choice is not an easy one. Maybe it's easy for Horn to throw down the gauntlet, come what may. But where does that leave the rest of us who cherish the stories of how Smilensky became Smith, and Zabarsky became Zabar?

Imagine that

joselitOctober 18, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Midterms are upon us and with them, a barrage of dates, facts, lab reports and other exercises that place a premium on processing information.

I thought I'd buck that trend by having the students in my Jewish Geography course, which explores the relationship of the modern Jewish experience to the American landscape, do something a tad more creative: to imagine themselves as newcomers, as immigrants, to the New World and to do so through a venue of their own choosing – or devising.

Drawing on the kit and caboodle of ideas, sounds, impressions (and misimpressions) that constitute their cultural baggage – on family stories passed down from generation to generation as well as on old, sepia-toned photographs - the students were encouraged to think – really think – about what immigration, transplantation and dislocation actually entailed.

I'm delighted to report that they acquitted themselves admirably. Some took to paper, others to song and still others to YouTube, giving voice to diary entries, reminiscences, short stories, recipes and mini-documentaries. A couple of students even created a performance piece.

Several women imagined themselves as men, while a handful of men imagined themselves as women. Some inhabited a world of their own making, creating fictional characters. Others built on the foundational stories of their ancestors. And still others found a congenial, real life historical personality and imagined what it must have been like to have been him or her.

A whole lot of conjuring going on…

One can only wonder what the man in Luis Sanguino's "The Immigrants" is wondering. Creative commons Flickr content by Wally Gobetz.