University of Oregon Department of History

History 358: American Jewish History  Winter 2011        

Instructor: William Toll                    

Office Tel: 541-346-4826      email: bill_toll@yahoo.com;  btoll@uoregon.edu                                                                     

Course Description

Introduction to course content

              This course will examine how Jewish immigrants, primarily from Central and Eastern Europe, came to create new communities and new identities as American Jews. The continuing evolution of capitalism in the United States has created growing markets that have required all Americans – including Jews-- to seek new economic niches and to migrate round the country. In addition, America’s unique political culture based on individual citizenship (rather than group rights) has required Jews –and all others-- to respond to their new status by creating new public lives. We will pay particular attention to ideologies that have facilitated Jewish reinvention, especially the religious philosophies of Reform and Conservative Judaism, and the secular philosophies of Socialism and Liberal Pluralism. We will also examine how American Jewish leaders have reconciled American citizenship with Zionism and the state of Israel.

              The course will proceed chronologically, beginning with the status of European Jewry in the 17th & 18th centuries. Jews, though living in a variety of settings from Holland to Poland, were everywhere stigmatized and subject to the interests of the ruling classes. In response, Jews moved around Europe in search of opportunity or security, and as part of that migration settled in Holland and England and some of their colonies in the Americas . We will examines the revolutionary changes in identity and status that began there. We will then focus on the American Revolution and the federal Constitution, which for the first time disallowed a national government from stigmatizing religious communities and created the context for a distinctively American Jewish identity.

In the mid-19^th century, America’s expanding economy drew millions of persons, including hundreds of thousands of Jews, to settle along the new trade routes. Economic opportunity, civic equality, and pioneer status promoted among Jewish leaders a desire to transform Judaism. Judaism changed from a culture bounded by religious law into a  “rational religion” focused on  practical ethics. But in America Jews also encountered a familiar set of demeaning stereotypes, which in the late 19^th century came to be labeled “anti-Semitism.” We will examine how in America’s expanding economy, liberal democracy, and multi-racial society anti-Semitism had very different consequences than in most parts of Europe.

              The middle portion of the course will analyze the migration of about two million Jews from Eastern Europe, as well as tens of thousands from the Ottoman Empire, to the United States between 1880 and World War I. They were about 10% of the migrants who came in response to industrial America’s insatiable demand for industrial labor. We will examine how large groups of Jews, in conjunction with other east and south European immigrants, became a new proletariat that settled into dense industrial neighborhoods. Many immigrant Jews at this time had their world view shaped less by religion than by Socialism and trade unionism. Others reshaped Judaism into a Conservative Movement that would reconcile Jewish cultural continuity and nationhood with American pluralism and citizenship. We conclude this portion of the course by comparing Jewish social mobility of the 1920s –including the move to Los Angeles-- with the era’s xenophobia and immigration restriction.

              The third portion of the course will examine how American Jewry from the 1940s through the 1980s faced the crises of the Holocaust and the founding of a Jewish state (Israel), while at the same migrating across America. The campaign to assure Israel’s survival has helped determine the political agenda of major Jewish organizations. We conclude the course by examining the geographic diffusion of American Jews, especially to the West, because the social patterns and ideologies of Jews in the Pacific West suggest a different future for American Jewry.  

Required Readings:

Books & a packet are available at U. of Oregon Book Store;

1. Jenna Joselit, The Wonders of America, Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950

2. Isaac Metzker, editor, A Bintel Brief

3. Chaim Potok, The Chosen

4. Packet for History 358: American Jewish History

5. Required readings on “e-Reserve” in the Knight Library

Writing Assignments: [80%] Due dates are listed on the class schedule

              Four writing assignments are required to complete this course successfully. Each one will require students to use assigned readings and lecture material to respond to questions. The questions will examine: (1) the adjustments Jews as communities had to make when moving from a European political culture based on corporate identities and privileges to an American political culture based on individual rights as equal citizens; (2) how Jewish communities  redefined their status and their religion in a new society with its own indigenous & stigmatized “races”; (3) the mobility of East European Jews and their cultural transformation in America’s largest cities during the general transition to industrial mass production; (4) the manner in which American Jewry confronted the horrors of the Holocaust and the emergence of the state of Israel during their own transition to suburban affluence.

The four essays are expected to be about five to eight pages in length and to be documented with references to the assigned readings. Memos that provide the specific questions on which your essays must focus will be provided about ten days before each paper is due.   

The first essay assignment is attached to this syllabus.      

 Class Participation [20% of grade]

This portion of the grade will be based on class participation, which will depend on the individual student asking questions and participating in class discussions. Students can –and should-- initiate class discussion by bringing questions from the assigned reading to class. In the past some students have expressed to me a reticence to speak in class.  I encourage students to speak up, in part so I can improve my ability to teach about this material. But I will never reduce a student’s grade below what she or he has earned through written work because of a reticence to speak in class. Class participation can –and should-- improve a student’s grade.     

First Essay Assignment;

This essay will be due in class on Thursday, January 20, 2011

Question:

 Instructions: Answer each of the following two questions in about three pages each. Should you find it easier, you may combine the two questions into one and write one longer (six page) answer. You MUST use examples from many of the readings and you MAY use examples from the lectures to VERIFY your conclusions.

1. What were the primary economic and political pressures that forced or induced Jews in particular to move around Western Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and why did thousands then choose to move to specific places –and not to others-- in the Americas?  (Use specific European locale like Amsterdam or London and American locales like Curacao or New York to illustrate how these pressures were manifested in the lives of Jews.)

2.How were the challenges for redefining a Jewish identity in the new United States (1780 to 1820) different from what the challenges had been in 17^th century Amsterdam?  Specifically, how did the issues raised by the American Revolution-- with its emphasis on democracy and equality—shape a new view of what an American Jewish community should be?

History 358: American Jewish History                   Winter 2011

Class Schedule & Assigned Readings   

R after a reading refers to Knight Library’s E-Reserve service through several items have been placed on reserve for this class under History 358. See next page for list.

Packet of Required Readings

1.  Jonathan Sarna, “The Revolution in the American Synagogue,” in Creating American Jews, Historical Conversations About Identity  (National Museum of American Jewish History, 1998), 10-23

2. Vincent P Carosso, “A Financial Elite: New York’s German-Jewish Investment Bankers, “American Jewish Historical Quarterly (September, 1976), 67-88.

3  Gustav A Danziger, “The Jew in San Francisco, the Last Half Century,” Overland Monthly (April, 1895), 381-410.

4  “Conference Paper of Dr. K Kohler,” in Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference [1885]

5.  Jonathan Sarna, “The ‘Mythical Jew’ & the  ‘Jew Next Door’ in Nineteenth Century America,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed David Gerber (University of Illinois Press, 1986), 57-78.

6. Theodore Bingham, “Foreign. Criminals in New York” North American Review (September, 1908), 383-94

7.  Ernest Poole, “Abraham Cahan, Socialist, Journalist, Friend of the Ghetto,” Outlook (Oct 28, 1911), 467-478

8.  Abraham Cahan, “The Late Rabbi Joseph, Hebrew Patriarch of New York,” American Review of Reviews,  XXVI (September, 1902), 311-14

9.  B.G. Richards, “Zionism & Socialism,” Arena (March, 1903), 276-87

10. Louis Brandeis, The Jewish Problem, and How to Solve It (pamphlet, 1915)

11. Judah Magnes, “Jewry at the End of the War: A Review,” 647-51.

12. Henry Ford, “Jewish Supremacy in Motion Picture World,” Dearborn Independent, (Feb 19, 1921); Henry Ford’s Apology to Jews,” Outlook (July 20, 1927), 372-74

13. Ralph R Boas, “Jew-Baiting in America,” Atlantic Monthly (May, 1921), 658-665

14. “Warner Brothers,” Fortune (December, 1937), 110-13, 206--; “Los Angeles Little Cutters,” Fortune (May, 1945), 134--;

15. William Zuckerman, “The Jews—A Nation Trapped,” Nation (August 20, 1930), 200 -01; Charles Angoff, “Nazi Jew-Baiting in America,” Nation (May 1, 1935), 501-03

16. I.F. Stone, “Born Under Fire,” New Republic (May 31, 1948), 12-14;  I.F. Stone, ”Against All Rules,” New Republic (June 14, 1948),14-17; J.L. Teller, “The New Nation in the Middle East,”  New Republic (November 22, 1948),11-15; Freda Kirchway, “Israel at First Glance,” Nation (November 27, 1948), 598-600

17. The Jewish Elan,” Fortune (February, 1960)

18. Joel Kotkin, “Jews and Latinos,” Los Angeles Times, Opinion, (March 25,2001); Joel Kotkin, “Jews Stick to Their Turf,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (Jan 3, 2003); Robert Goldblum, “Gambling on the Jewish Future,” The Jewish Week (June 17,2004) [all articles on-line];Bob Colancello, “Eli Broad’s Big Picture,” Vanity Fair (December, 2006), 325-330,379-384.

Additional Required Readings

Jane S Gerber, “The Westward Journey,” chapter 7 of The Jews of Spain, A History of the Sephardic Experience  ( New York: The Free Press, 1992), 177- 211.

James H. Williams, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherlands, and New York,”

Yosef H Yerushalmi, ”Between Amsterdam and New Amsterdam: The Place of Curacao and the Caribbean in Early Modern Jewish History, American Jewish History (1982) 172-92

Arthur Kiron, “Mythologizing 1654,” Scholarship at Penn Libraries (2004), on-line

Virginia B. Platt, “’And Don’t Forget the Guinea Voyage’: The Slave Trade of Aaron Lopez of Newport,” William & Mary Quarterly

Holly Snyder, “Queens of the Household, the Jewish Women of British America,” in P Nadell & J Sarna, eds., Women and American Judaism, Historical Perspectives (Hanover & London: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 15-45

Beth S. Wenger,  “Sculpting an American Jewish Hero: The Monuments, Myths and Legends of Haym Salomon,” in Divergent Jewish Cultures Israel & America, eds Deborah D Moore & S Ilan Troen (New Haven: Yale U Press, 2001) 123-151.

Jonathan Sarna, “’A Sort of Paradise for the Hebrews’: The Lofty Vision of Cincinnati Jews,” in Henry Shapiro and Jonathan Sarna, eds., Ethnic Diversity and Civic Identity, Patterns of Conflict and Cohesion in Cincinnati Since 1820 (Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1992), 131-64.

Eric L Goldstein, “The Great Wave,” in M. L. Raphael, ed., The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America (NY: Columbia U Press, 2008), 70-88.

Daniel Gordis, “More than Just a Hebrew-speaking America,” chapter 8 of Saving Israel, How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End John (Hoboken NJ: Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2009), 125-47.