In the early 20th century,
American xenophobia and antisemitism,
combined with the desire to fit in
pushed many Jewish immigrants to downplay their Judaism.
They turned their backs on their old countries
to embrace their new home,
even when that new home wasn't too happy to have them.
But when their brothers and sisters in Europe faced a crisis
of unimaginable horror, these American Jews
were forced to reconsider their place in America.
(dramatic music)
While Jews began arriving in America in the 1600s,
there were still less than 200,000 American Jews
by the end of the 19th century,
when over 2 million Jews from Russia arrived,
fleeing pogroms.
Unfortunately for these new immigrants,
the 2 million Jews arrived as part of a larger wave
of over 20 million total immigrants
from Eastern and Southern Europe that sparked a backlash
among Anglo-Americans who wanted to keep out immigrants
they considered racially or culturally inferior.
Congress passed the Johnson Reed Act in 1924,
limiting the annual quota of immigrants from each country
to only 2% of the population from that country
recorded on the US Census of 1890.
Lawmakers purposely chose a census
taken before the peak of the immigration wave,
a time when Anglo-Saxons made up a much larger percentage
of a population than they did in 1924.
As a result, this 2% quota created extremely strict limits
on Italians, Poles, Jews and other immigrants
from outside of Western Europe.
Through this law, senators sought to massively decrease
the immigration of what one of the law's sponsors called,
"Men of alien speech and thoughts and habits."
After the Johnson Reed Act, the influx of Jews
all but stopped, and as the Jews who were already in America
had children, Native-born Jewish Americans
became a larger and larger portion of the population.
These native-born Jews sought to rise
above the hard labor and crowded tenements
that characterized the lives of many of their parents.
They excelled in school and pursued higher education
to gain access to middle-class careers.
By 1900, Jews made up 8.5% of college students,
despite representing only 2% of the U.S. population.
And by 1935, 60% of native-born Jews in New York
were working in clerical or related white-collar work,
compared to only 10% of their immigrant parents.
Education offered an opportunity to join the middle class
but it also compounded the threat of assimilation.
Public schools sought to Americanize Jewish children
by promoting American values,
celebrating holidays like Halloween and Christmas,
and sometimes even encouraging them to look down
on their parents for being greenhorns
who couldn't speak proper English
as a result of these pressures, many young Jews
rejected aspects of their Jewish identity
and even changed their names to conceal their heritage.
Educated Jews with white-collar jobs began to build
a new Jewish middle class in the 1910s, '20s and '30s.
These newly prosperous Jews often cared more
about social and educational opportunities
than religious responsibilities.
To maintain the relevance of synagogues
for these less observant Jews,
many rabbis added events and classes
that focused on cultural rather than religious concerns.
For example, the bar mitzvah transformed from a meaningful
but simple religious ceremony
into an elaborate social affair with food and dancing.
While Jews embraced America,
much of America didn't reciprocate.
As economically mobile Jews sought out
middle class opportunities like universities,
suburbs, and vacations, institutions restructured
their admission to keep them out.
Suburbs relied on restrictive housing covenants
and universities instated Jewish quotas
while many hotels and resorts simply banned Jews outright.
Public figures like the famed pilot, Charles Lindbergh,
and radio personality, Father Charles Coughlin,
expressed sympathy for German fascism,
while the German American Bund drew over 20,000 supporters
to a fascist rally in Madison Square Garden.
Barred from access to many aspects of middle class America,
Jews built parallel institutions that mimicked
the organizations that rejected them,
embracing American values
despite meeting with American resistance.
They established communities and neighborhoods
like Grand Concourse in the Bronx
and the Upper West Side in Manhattan,
that offered tree-line streets and parks
similar to the suburbs.
They built community centers and cities
and resorts in the Poconos and Catskills.
But as the community was turning inwards and embracing
the ideals in their new home,
a new threat was rising back in Europe.
When the Nazis took over Germany in the 1930s,
American Jewish communities struggled to reconcile
the desire to help their Jewish brethren
with their fear of rocking the boat.
When a group of Jewish veterans
boycotted German goods in 1935,
the president of the American Jewish Committee
called it dangerous because it would alienate
the rest of America.
Organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee,
formed by wealthy members of the Reform movement
and the Orthodox Vaad Hahatzala Rescue Committee,
did manage to fund rescue efforts that saved
tens of thousands of Jews.
Overall, though, the response among American Jews
was muted by a desire to fit in
and avoid triggering further antisemitism.
While it is impossible to know if a more forceful response
from the Jewish world would have affected policy,
it is clear that the U.S. government proved
tragically resistant to helping Jews escape the Holocaust.
America accepted around 200,000 refugees
between 1933 and 1945, most of them Jewish,
but authorities rejected hundreds of thousands
of desperate asylum seekers and boats of desperate refugees
were turned back to die in Nazi gas chambers.
Once America joined World War II, the discovery
of the full extent of the Nazi extermination machine
galvanized Jewish and non-Jewish Americans
to confront the horror of antisemitic ideology.
Open antisemitism faded,
institutions struck down quota systems,
and the suburbs opened up to Jews,
yet while America became more willing to integrate Jews,
the devastation of the Holocaust pushed many American Jews
to double down on their specifically Jewish identities.
Between 1945 and 1965, the Jewish community built
over a thousand synagogues and the number of children
attending Jewish schools more than doubled.
While non-Jewish institutions became more accessible,
the parallel organizations that Jews had set up
grew even further, creating a vibrant
uniquely Jewish identity in the post-war years.
Like so many immigrant groups in the past and the present,
Jews fought for decades to be included
in what it means to be American.
They embraced the American ideals,
even when the country rejected them.
They struggled to straddle two identities
with a complex and at times, antagonistic history,
all of which has resulted in a proud,
complicated, diverse community that has found a way
to build a hybrid identity, both Jewish and American.