Kaparos – From Under the Fig Tree

When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled around America in the 1830s, what most impressed him was the nation’s penchant for sociability. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations … religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive,” he wrote bemusedly. “The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes.” Antebellum America was nothing if not a nation of joiners.

The keen-eyed Frenchman did not have America’s Jews in his sights when he put pen to paper, but he might well have. In the years that followed the publication of Democracy in America, they took to organizational life like a duck to water. From coast to coast, the American Jewish landscape was awash in voluntary associations.

A partial list, culled at random from the American Jewish Year Book of 1910, ran to hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish organizations, most of them local. Their ranks included the Hebrew Ladles Helping Hand of Lynn, Massachusetts, and the Hebrew Socialist Club of Salem; the Sons of Moses in St. Paul, the Fraternity of Peace in St. Louis and the Hungarian Brotherly Love Benevolent Society of Yorkville, New York.
...continue reading "Civics 101"