Publications
Newsletters
Mainstreaming Jewish Philadephia:
Business and Politics As Currents of Consciousness [1]
January 1997
by William W. Cutler, III, Department of History Temple University
Introduction
In 1995 the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation made a grant to the Myer and Rosaline Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University to conduct a series of oral history interviews with prominent Jews from Philadelphia. In accepting this award, the Feinstein Center promised to conduct thirty interviews in two years. Moreover, it was understood that the project was not to be just an exercise in data collection. Its central purpose was to increase the Philadelphia Jewish community's awareness of its cultural, historical, and political heritage even as the boundaries between Jews and the city's Christian majority are fading or at least blurring. According to Barry W. Holtz, co-director of the Melton Research Center and professor of Jewish education and texts at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, "we live in a time in which personal testimony seems to be a powerful method of effecting change. . . . Thus the use of personal memoirs as a means of exploring the question 'Why be Jewish?' has great potential." [2]
Methodology and Research Design
In launching the project the Center's director, Dr. Murray Friedman invited me to become its oral history consultant. Nancy Isserman, the Feinstein Center's Coordinator, also worked on the project. The three of us agreed from the outset to seek input from as many different sources as possible as we developed the research design. In spring, 1995 we met with a delegation from the leadership of the American Jewish Committee's
Philadelphia branch to obtain advice on who should be interviewed and what the topics of conversation should be. By June it had been decided that the project would work with Jewish civic and business leaders. Our interviewers would ask them about their relationship over time with the city's Christian majority--both the Anglo-Protestant establishment and the black Protestant and white Roman Catholic rank and file. We wanted to know if and when our subjects (hereafter referred to as narrators) thought
Jews became part of Philadelphia's economic and political mainstream.
The Feinstein Center's oral history project addresses two significant aspects of American life. By examining the mainstreaming of Jewish business and political leaders, it is making an important contribution to the history of equal opportunity and meritocracy, two concepts that are integral to the ideology of the American Dream. By studying what it means to belong, the project is also increasing our understanding of the dynamic tension between being inside and outside a cultural mainstream. This tension has affected American Jews for a long time, but in recent years it has taken on new significance as more and more Jews have made their cultural identity a matter of personal choice.
Preliminary Findings
To date, the project has completed eight interviews. Several others are in progress or are about to begin. The narrators include five businessmen, three politicians, two civil servants, and the former president of a public university. All but one belong to the generation of Jewish Americans that came of age between the beginning of World War I and the onset of the great depression. Among the eight whose interviews are finished, seven were born in the United States, and three are at least second generation Americans. For them, assimilation was not about the conflict between a foreign homeland and America but about the distance between the dominant culture in the United States and their own. It was about the possibilities and limits of being Jewish in a democratic, capitalistic, and predominantly Christian land. [Editor's note: As of 2008, 50 interviews were completed.]
We have found that there is a special burden associated with being male and Jewish in an ostensibly meritocratic society. Until recently, most Americans professed to believe in talent and effort as the keys to success. For our narrators this was a compelling message even if their experiences as adolescents or young adults did not always offer much confirmation. They translated the language of meritocracy into the feeling that the ambitious Jewish man had to be better than everyone else if he wanted to make it in America, let alone enter the mainstream. For example, accounting firms were reluctant to hire Jews in the 1950s even though there was a shortage of qualified people. "There was tremendous . . . opportunity for advancement," one of our narrators recalled, "but you had to be better." Changing social and economic conditions helped Jews gain acceptance. In the 1960s even the big firms had to scramble for talent, "so they figured they'd risk taking a Jew [and] as it turned out, they performed pretty well. So once that happened there was more and more of it. And times in general then started to change, too."
Another narrator recounted a similar experience, but he gave a more positive interpretation. Hired by a Gentile law firm in 1947, he remembers having to be outstanding to achieve recognition. The attorney who hired him "didn't take people based on the fact that they were relatives, or rich or anything. They had to be very good lawyers. He had very high standards." Perhaps merit was all that mattered, but it took a
man of exceptional talent to cross the divide between Jew and Gentile in the legal profession.
In his business career one narrator felt the pressure of high expectations. A former president of his professional association, he made a second mark in community service as a director and officer of many educational, medical, and social welfare organizations. He often became the token Jew on the board of Christian organizations, including a
Catholic hospital, a Jesuit university, and the Greater Metropolitan YMCA. "Being in my profession," he explained, "where you're dealing in future expectations, that must be part of why I want[ed] this community to work, and why I want[ed] to work for it. But I think that basically, as you put it, my real motivation has always been my commitment to leaving this world a little better than before we got here, and the responsibility that a Jew particularly has to set an example, not by what he says, but by what he does. And I feel that's very important."
Our narrators have also spoken about the importance to them of their Jewish heritage and identity. They have made it clear that being Jewish is self-defining, no matter what else one wants to be. "I became a Jew by choice, not just by birth," one narrato r said. "When I had a chance to study other religions I thought that Judaism seemed to be the
most logical and the most rational and the most committed in many ways." Another interpreted the meaning of his Jewish heritage less philosophically. "When you're Jewish," he said, "or when you're any kind of minority, and you live in a neighborhood, nobody lets you forget that you're a minority. . . . I had that my whole life, until I got married, and I still have it occasionally." However, despite his feelings of vulnerability, complete assimilation is not an option for him. "I don't choose to be assimilated now," he said. "But I'm a little bit more secure as a person than I was when I was young."
Other narrators recalled being pulled in opposite directions by their Jewish identity. When one became president of a major Philadelphia cultural institution, his Jewish friends were thrilled that he got the job, not for him, but for the Jewish community. However, his Main Line acquaintances made him believe that they felt differently. They didn't think about his 'being Jewish.' They were glad he got the job because it was right for him. Another narrator described being Jewish as a personal characteristic, not a marker of social identity. "Everyone knows that I'm Jewish," he said. "And if it doesn't bother them that I'm working for some Christian organization, it surely doesn't bother me." But this man also reported acute disappointment at his children' s decision not to raise their own children as Jews. "As far as the Jewish community's concerned, I'm a loser," he said. "And when I go on, I'm not sure, as far as formal Judaism is concerned, what's going to be left."
Based upon our results at mid stream, it seems self-evident that the Feinstein Center's oral history project is documenting interesting and important themes. How representative they are remains to be seen. Not only must we complete our interviews, but other researchers must integrate our findings into works that draw upon many sources in addition to oral history. But perhaps one conclusion is unimpeachable even at this intermediate stage. Memory is essential to state of mind. How our Jewish narrators feel about themselves today is a direct function of how they remember the past. For them, merging with the American mainstream was a defining experience. Sharing many perceptions and feelings, they possess a self-consciousness that is conjoint. It results from being part of a cultural community held together by the force of collective memory. But there may well be a special irony in the story of this accomplished generation. Its success at mainstreaming may change forever the capacity
of Jewish culture for collective recollection.
Footnotes
[1] A longer version of this essay was presented at the 1996 annual meeting of the Oral History Association. For full annotation contact the author.
[2] Barry W. Holtz, "Why Be Jewish," Being Jewish (American Jewish Committee, 1995), 22.