The saga of New York Jews

The sweep of history is portrayed in these extremely readable 1,108 pages

By MATT NESVISKY
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg R 311 (photo credit: REUTERS/Andrew Burton)
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg R 311
(photo credit: REUTERS/Andrew Burton)
Not long ago a reader contributed to The New York Times’s popular “Metropolitan Diary” column the following admonishment delivered by a mother to a young child as overheard on 86th Street, “We do not celebrate Hanukka. We are Christian. We celebrate Christmas. And, no, you cannot have a dreidel.”
Just the week before, the same newspaper observed on its front page that with Michael Bloomberg soon to finish his third term as mayor, no Jewish candidate is being considered for the position by either the Democrats or the Republicans – this for the first time in more than a generation.
Somewhere in between the anecdote and the news report resides what seems to me a significant commentary on the state of Jewish New York City. The Jewish impact on Gotham remains palpable. At the same time, however, it appears that the Jewish role in what was once arguably the greatest Jewish urban center in history has peaked.
Indeed, if any theme arises out of the handsome three-volume boxed set recently published by New York University Press under the general title “City of Promises,” it is that the history of Jews in New York, which commenced in 1654, is marked by constant movement, flux and change. In other words, at any given moment in this 350-year saga, the character and status of the Jews in the city look rather different from that of the Jews at any other moment. If this makes these Jews somewhat difficult to pin down – well, why should these Jews be different from any other? Yet traditionally they have been different, distinguished not only from Jews in other lands but even from other American Jews.
As one of the authors of this history points out, Jews elsewhere in America customarily viewed New York members of the tribe as “undesirable… loud, unrestrained, poor (or ‘new rich’), lower-class, un-American… and either too traditionally religious or politically radical.”
I’d add that American Jews outside of New York have also tended to view their New York brethren with no small measure of envy – for their confidence, their energy, and their substantial influence on the entire nation’s arts, culture, sciences, economy and so much more.
Volume I in this set is “Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654- 1865” by Howard B. Rock, a historian recently retired from Florida International University.
Volume II is “Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840- 1920” by Annie Polland, vice president for programs and education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Daniel Soyer, a history professor at Fordham University in the Bronx. Volume III is “Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920-2010” by Jeffrey S. Gurock, professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University. The general editor is Deborah Dash Moore, director of Judaic Studies and professor of history at the University of Michigan. She also contributes a foreword that appears in each book.
Each of the volumes is extremely readable and not nearly as intimidating as its total of 1,108 pages might suggest; each volume runs from 250-300 pages, the rest being notes and other apparatus. Nonetheless, “City of Promises” taken together reminds me of nothing so much as one of those obscenely humongous pastrami sandwiches served at the Carnegie Deli, so overstuffed as it is with irresistible information and insight.
The sweep of history is so huge in these books that I can only suggest what is covered: the initial 23 Sephardi refugees from the Dutch colony of Recife, Brazil, who arrived in a Manhattan that decidedly did not want them; the enthusiastic Jewish embrace of the American Revolution and the freedoms it promised; the development of American Reform Judaism; the Jewish voices raised (on both sides) on the slavery issue; the New York Jews’ lead in the condemnation of the Damascus blood libel and the Kishinev pogroms; the Jewish reformers who helped bring down the corrupt municipal gang known as the Boss Tweed Ring; the Jewish leadership in unionization, socialism, Zionism, and cooperative movements; the pioneering work – most often by women – in community service, health care and immigrant aid; the disproportionate Jewish participation in New York’s garment industry, printing, manufacturing and retailing – and later in the arts, music, literature, advertising, fashion, finance and mass media; the overrepresentation of Jewish students in the city’s elite public schools and universities; the sorry story of the Jewish-black confrontation over the city’s schools; the New York Jews’ prominence in the struggle for free emigration of Soviet Jews; the development of egalitarian and alternative Jewish worship; the phenomenal post-war growth of Orthodox Jewry in the city’s outer boroughs.
Much of this history is familiar, much of it not. Among the many things I learned from “City of Promises” is that Jews once dominated the notorious Five Points slum (the setting of Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film “Gangs of New York”). That Jews began drifting away from religious observance almost from the moment they first set foot on Manhattan Island. (It is estimated that at least a third of today’s New York Jews have no synagogue affiliation.) That Jews often faced housing restrictions in many New York neighborhoods. That Dr. Jonas Salk, the developer of the first polio vaccine, originally planned to study law – and enrolled in the City College of New York only after he was denied entrance to more prestigious universities. That city planner Robert Moses destroyed several major Jewish enclaves in New York, not only changing the face of several boroughs but also changing their Jewish communities forever. That as many Middle Eastern Jews have migrated to New York in recent years as have Russian Jews (not to mention anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 Israelis). And on and on.
But what most impressed me was the aforementioned theme of New York Jews being in perpetual motion. For example, we all associate Jews with Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but how many of us are aware that the neighborhood had a constantly changing population, with Jews moving out almost as quickly as they moved in, in favor of other parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and elsewhere. (An indeterminate number of Jews also returned to the “old country,” as did perhaps as many as one-third of all immigrants to New York.) “City of Promises” may not be the definitive history of Jewish New York – we may need something of encyclopedic dimensions for that – but it does have the facts, the stats, the authoritative sources and the appealing human-interest anecdotes and case studies that make it very satisfying. It also has, however, some unsightly blemishes. Among these are too many typos for a university press. It also gives inadequate space to Jewish criminals and, more surprisingly, to Jewish contributions to New York’s literary and mass media worlds (no Sulzbergers, for example, in the indexes).
Most unhappy is the addition of “visual essays” written, or curated, by art historian Diana L. Linden and appended to each volume. These peculiar constructs focus on visual artifacts of Jewish New York, but in the aggregate they make no sense to me: a photo of Lenny Bruce being arrested, a picture of an elephant sculpture on Coney Island, an advertisement for Maidenform bras, several pieces of often unattractive artwork created by Jews but conveying no apparent Jewish content. The main text is already illustrated; I cannot understand why separate “visual essays” were deemed necessary.
Jews at their height in the post-war era numbered over two million in Gotham, or fully one quarter of the city’s population.
Today both that number and proportion have been halved (although a million or more Jews live in the suburbs and surrounding towns).
Jewish hipsters meanwhile have been moving into the Lower East Side tenements that their grandparents were so eager to flee. The Hassidic and other Orthodox populations are growing daily in Brooklyn, the Bronx and elsewhere.
And although there may not be another Jewish mayor for New York immediately on the horizon (I think we may discount the quixotic self-nomination of Anthony Weiner), the current mayor has proved to be perhaps the most effective in recent memory. Author Jeffrey Gurock, however, may be alone in describing Michael Bloomberg as “dashing.”
A billionaire, yes, but dashing? Whatever the case, the story of Jewish New York seems far from over. 