The USA's German Jews tried to help the Eastern European Jews to assimilate (pages 230-235):
... A struggle ensued, sometimes fraternal, sometimes fractious, about the best ways to help the hordes of east Europeans find a place in the new world.=====
One focus of this struggle was the Educational Alliance, curious mixture of night school, settlement house, day-care center, gymnasium, and public forum. The Alliance represented a tangible embodiment of the German Jews’ desire to help, to uplift, to clean up and quiet down their “co-religionists.” .... It became for several decades a major source of help to the new immigrants, as well as a major cause of contention between [Manhattan's] uptown [German] and downtown [Eastern European] Jews.
In forming the Educational Alliance the German Jews were influenced - by the settlement-house movement of the 1880’s ... to provide the poor with cultural and moral aids that would train them to help themselves. That the motives of the German Jews were often pure seems beyond doubt. They poured money, time, and energy into the Alliance, and often were rewarded by the downtown Jews with fury and scorn. Yet neither can it be doubted that the attitudes of the German Jews were calculated to enrage. An uptown [German-Jewish] weekly, the Jewish Messenger, announced that the new immigrants “must be Americanized in spite of themselves, in the mode prescribed by their friends and benefactors.” The Messenger found these plebeian Jews “slovenly in dress, loud in manners, and vulgar in discourse,” and would have liked to “pull down the ghetto . . . and scatter its members to the corners of the nation.” ....
Throughout its life the Alliance was wracked by the question: to what extent should it try to “Americanize” the greenhorns? A historian friendly to the Alliance wrote that some of the “older Jewish settlers [German Jews] wished to effect a rapid change in the lives of these immigrants. Impatient with people with whom they were neither socially nor intellectually en rapport but whom they could not help acknowledging as their own, they advocated the immediate abandonment by the immigrants of their old-world cultural patterns and the overnight transformation into full-fledged Americans.” Especially in the early years of the Alliance, this often meant that it aped such public — day and night — school routines as flag saluting and patriotic singing, which annoyed the stiff-necked immigrants, both Orthodox religious and orthodox radical, who felt they had a fair portion of culture on their own. ....
The 1899 report of the Alliance’s Committee on Moral Culture solemnly warned that “within the contracted limits of the New York ghetto ... medieval Orthodoxy and anarchistic license are struggling for mastery. A people whose political surroundings have entirely changed, who are apt to become intoxicated with liberty of action which has suddenly been vouchsafed to them . . . is apt to depart from its mooring and to become a moral menace.”
In later years the more sensitive leaders among the German Jews came to understand their errors in the Alliance and elsewhere. Louis Marshall wrote in a letter to a friend that the German Jews “held themselves aloof from the people. They acted as Lords and Ladies Bountiful bringing gifts to people who did not seek for gifts. . . . The work was done in such a manner as not only to give offense, but to arouse suspicion of the motives.” ...
From the moment of its birth the Educational Alliance came under attack. Orthodox Jews were aghast at its innovations in prayer, socialist Jews at its devotion to petty reform. In a group of Yiddish intellectuals, with the playwright Jacob Gordin at their head, set up a rival institution, the Educational League declaring it was time “the [Eastern European] people downtown cut away from the apron strings of the German Jews.” A mass meeting brought together two thousand people in March 1903 at the Grand Central Palace, where Gordin presented a skit ridiculing [German-Jewish] uptowners and “social workers.” Called “The Benefactors of the East Side,” it has a pretentious German-Jewish philanthropist declare that he and his ‘friends, “like Abraham Lincoln,” are working to liberate the slaves. “To be sure, the East Side people aren’t black, but they are Romanians. They aren’t Ethiopians, but they are Russians.” Gordin’s sketch was as effective as it was nasty, and his audience loved it.
Gradually the Alliance bent under such attacks, learning to show a bit more warmth and respect for the people it proposed to uplift. ....
The memories of Eugene Lyons were bitter: "We were 'Americanized' [by the Educational Alliance] about as gently as horses are broken in. In the whole crude process, we sensed a disrespect for the alien traditions in our homes and came unconsciously to resent and despise those traditions, good and bad alike, because they seemed insuperable barriers between ourselves and our adopted land." ....
The German Jews, intent upon seeing that the noses of those East Side brats were wiped clean, surely proved themselves to be insufferable, and anyone raised [downtown] ... had good reason to rage against the uptown Jews. Yet, in a way, the latter were right: physical exercise and hygiene were essential to the well-being of their “co-religionists” and somehow, through prodding and patronizing, they had to be convinced of this. The east European Jews felt free to release their bile because they knew that finally the German Jews would not abandon them, and the German Jews kept on with their good works even while reflecting on the boorishness of their” coreligionists.” Out of such friction came a modest portion of progress. ...
The USA's German Jews tried to establish a Yiddish-language newspaper that was written on a relatively high intellectual level (pages 543-544)
... the Yidishe Velt (“Jewish World”) ... [was] set up in 1902 with the help of a phalanx of German-Jewish millionaires .... Perhaps the ultimate presumption in the German-Jewish response to the east European Jews, this paper was started ... to be “everything that existing Yiddish newspapers are not, namely clean, wholesome, religious in tone; the advocate of all that makes good citizenship, and so far as politics are concerned, absolutely independent.” ...======
Though staffed by competent men, whose pay ($25 a week.minimum) was the highest among Yiddish papers, the Yidishe Velt was a fiasco from the start. ... In somewhat less than three years its backers lost over $100,000. The trouble was that its style was too bland for a public that liked its journalism highly seasoned; also, that it advocated “refinement” and gratitude to the yahudim (German Jews), which did not exactly endear it to the “uncouth masses.”
In politics, it propagandized for a civics-lesson “Americanism” and supported the municipal reformers of the Republican party, a group that never would learn to catch the ear of the East Side [Eastern European Jews]. Indifferent to Yiddish culture and insensitive to immigrant feelings, the paper came under merciless ridicule from its rivals, the Orthodox Tageblatt and the radical Forward, both of which, by contrast, sprang organically out of Jewish life. .... Uptown was uptown, downtown downtown, and it would take another half-century in the warmth of affluence before the twain could meet. ...
The Eastern European Jews gradually took over the USA's garment-manufacturing business from the German Jews (pages 154-155).
In 1890 the Baron de Hirsch Fund conducted a survey of more than 100,000 Jews on the East Side. Of the roughly 25,000 gainfully employed Jews among the respondents, more than 12,000 were listed as garment workers. During the decades to come, the number of Jewish workers in this industry would increase steadily. In 1900 over 40 percent of 35,000 female workers classified by the census as “Russian-born” and close to 20 percent of 191,000 male workers classified in the same way were listed as garment workers. Three decades later a much larger work force in the garment trades was still “predominantly Russian Jewish.” The fate of the east European immigrants was to be crucially intertwined with the development of the garment trades. ...The German Jews who had worked in the garment business gave up the competition and went on to other businesses (pages 139-140):
For the women’s clothing industry, the years of sharpest growth were during this period, one that coincided with the upsurge of Jewish immigration. .... By the time east European Jews started to arrive in large numbers, a good part of the clothing industry was owned by German Jews, who had come here in the 1840’s and 1890’s ...
Finding it easier to deal with a German-Jewish employer than a gentile one, the east European immigrants moved into the garment trades. Other factors reinforced this trend: many of the immigrants had some experience in tailoring; jobs were not hard to come by in an industry that doubled its size with each decade of the Jewish migration from eastern Europe; and, perhaps most important, as the work became increasingly routinized, no very great skills were required for most of the available jobs.
Such improved systems of production were at first conducted in large lofts, but with the arrival of masses of east European Jews the industry spilled over into sweatshops, unventilated tenement rooms packed with teams of eight to twenty who pored over worktables and sewing machines. With the growth and rationalization of the industry, conditions improved ...
Among east European Jewish immigrants in the garment industry who were over sixteen years of age at the time of their arrival, one out of two was earning more than $12.50 a week — compared with fewer than one out of three south Italian males, two out of three German males, and one out of twenty Russian-Jewish females. Jewish heads of families in the garment industry aver aged $502 a year; most worked between nine and twelve months a year. Fully a third of Jewish heads of families earned less than $400 a year. What kept these people going was that most families had more than one worker, that they were well trained in the arts of self-denial, that they lived by a goal of expectation that gave some meaning to deprivations of the moment. ...
By 1900 Jewish dominance of the garment industry was all but complete; over 90 percent of it was in Jewish hands. The east European Jews were taking long strides toward driving their German cousins out of the industry .... The Moths of Division Street, as the Russian contractors were called, had forced the German giants of Broadway to retreat.” Between 1900 and 1912 the number of women’s garment shops in New York and its environs increased from 1,856 to 5,698; the number employing up to nineteen workers, from 898 to 3,828; and there can be no question that the vast preponderance of these employers was now made up of east European Jews. ...======
There were dozens, perhaps scores, of newly rich east European Jews. Impressive as these achievements were if placed against the backdrop of immigrant life, they remained inconsequential in comparison with the wealth of either the German Jews or the American elite. The east Europeans shied away from the mainstream of American economy, or, to be more precise, had no chance to approach it. They had nothing to do with the major industries and very little with Wall Street; they were confined to light manufacturing, distributive industries, and real estate. ... Such pursuits having been central to the Jewish economy of eastern Europe, it was only natural that they be transported across the ocean. ...
In general, the USA's German Jews belonged to the Republican Party, whereas the Eastern European Jews belonged to the Democratic Party (pages 360-363).
Of all the sectors of American life that were open to them, old-party politics was the one that immigrant Jews were the slowest to enter. Work was a necessity for survival, education seemed an entry to the future, but politics — it would take several decades before east European Jews could feel I at home with the big-city machines, their strange skills, codes, corruptions, and vulgarities.=====
The east European Jews brought with them a skimpy political experience. To the Orthodox the idea of a secular politics was inherently suspect, to the radicals an untried if tempting possibility. In the political life of czarist Russia Jews had been allowed at most a token representation, more humiliating than enabling. Many were still in the grip of the traditional Jewish persuasion that it was best to keep as far away from politics as possible, since any involvement with the affairs of the gentiles would probably be dangerous and certainly degrading. Within east European Jewish life, secular politics was a novel experience; mostly, it was an “internal” politics, necessarily abstract and visionary, without much grounding in the realities of power or administration. Sharing this limited background in public life, both the Orthodox and the radical immigrants tended to look upon the politics of American cities as still another antic of the gentiles ...
In the last third of the nineteenth century, some immigrant Jews, mostly German, became prominent in the Republican Party. Arriving in mid- century as sympathizers with the democratic spirit of 1848, the German Jews usually sided with the northern cause; it seemed only natural that they should rally to the banner of antislavery and the party of “Father Abraham.” In the decades after the Civil War their allegiance remained largely with the Republicans, and this no doubt played a certain role in prompting Republican administrations to make diplomatic representations in behalf of persecuted Jews in Europe. ...
With time, as the Republicans showed themselves to be the party of respectable conservatism, the German Jews, increasingly affluent and at ease in America, tended to drift in the same direction. They gained places of honor in the party’s ranks ... And by the turn of the century, a number of high- minded German Jews in New York ... came to see the Republican party as the necessary antagonist to Tammany corruption. ...
In the course of establishing themselves in this country, the German Jews built up a number of national organizations devoted to fraternal and quasi-political ends, ranging from B’nai B’rith to the American Jewish Committee. Later, the east European Jews would begin to enter and slowly transform these organizations. In accord with the experience of the European Jews that even while trying to influence gentile political parties it was best to keep a certain distance from them, these national Jewish organizations proved to be effective at quietly lobbying in behalf of Jewish interests. The strength of their own communal organizations may thus have been one reason for the caution with which both German and east European Jews made their way into American politics. ....
In the early years of the twentieth century the Republicans still kept a strong hold on Jewish voters, at least during presidential elections. Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive rhetoric and philo-Semitism won their hearts: it was pleasing that so echt [genuine] an American should seem so well disposed to them. ...
In New York City the Republicans were usually more generous than the Democrats in nominating Jewish — mostly German-Jewish — candidates for local office, if only because a Republican nomination seldom brought much chance for election and could therefore be dispensed to marginal groups with a ready show of benevolence.
For the east European Jews, apart from those who gave themselves to the cause of socialism, the major arena in American politics would always be the Democratic party. ...
The USA's German Jews led the way in scholarship, and the Eastern European Jews caught up slowly (pages 498-499)
By 1900 the German Jews in America had created scholarly and cultural institutions decidedly more imposing than those of the east European immigrants. In 1875 ... wealthy German Jews set up the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, long to serve as a center of Judaic scholarship and a training college for Reform rabbis. Along similar lines, the Jewish Publication Society was formed in 1888 and the American Jewish Historical Society in 1892; while the Jewish Encyclopedia issued in the early 1900’s an impressive compendium of Wissenschaft des Judentums, synthesized for the American reader and containing solid contributions by scholars ...
Both the Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, founded in 1887 to train conservatively oriented rabbis, entered upon a period of productive scholarship ...Dropsie College, an institution devoted to Judaic scholarship, though not rabbinical in orientation, was set up in 1907. While the faculties of these institutions had some scholars with east European backgrounds, they drew mainly on the resources of German Jewry. “The rabbis and scholars trained in German methods,” writes Joshua Trachtenberg in his survey of American Jewish scholarship ...
By comparison, the scholarly achievements of the east European Jews during the early years of the mass migration were meager. Mired in poverty and cut off from old-world roots, the yeshivas that were set up in several large American cities could neither match the standards of traditional rabbinical learning nor satisfy the intellectual needs of most Jews in the new world. ...
Only after the turn of the century did there begin to appear in America a group of scholar-intellectuals who worked in Yiddish, devoted themselves mainly to secular themes, and were oriented to the intellectual regeneration of the Yiddish-speaking masses. The conditions under which they lived and worked, both in eastern Europe and America, were sharply different from any we are likely to associate with the academic or intellectual life.
When secular-minded intellectuals began to appear in the east European Jewish community during the second half of the nineteenth century, its official leaders, rabbinical and otherwise, proved sharply hostile — and understandably so. For between the values of religious Orthodoxy and those of modern intellectuality there could be no lasting peace, only an occasional common defense against external enemies. ...
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