- The United States is one
of the first countries in the history
of the world where Jews received equal rights.
George Washington embraced Jews as citizens.
And over the next centuries, prominent Jews earned a place
in every field of American success.
Yet Jews in America also faced brutal sweatshops,
pressure to assimilate,
antisemitic regulations and even lynchings.
So how did American Jews find a home
in a land so full of contradictions?
[dramatic music]
The first Jews came to the United States
before its states even united.
When Portugal drove out the Dutch from Brazil in 1654,
a group of 23 Jews fled to New Amsterdam.
Peter Stuyvesant, director general of the colony,
tried to push them out
but after three years of legal wrangling,
they were allowed to settle in Manhattan
as long as they did not build a synagogue
or run for public office.
In the 18th century,
Jews from Germany and Poland crossed the Atlantic
to find a new home and joined the revolutionary fervor
of American independence.
In light of this support,
President George Washington wrote a letter
to the Hebrew congregation
of Providence, Rhode Island stating.
"May the children of the Stock of Abraham,
who dwell in this land,
continue to merit
and enjoy the good will of other inhabitants;
while everyone shall sit in safety
under his own vine and fig tree,
and there shall be none to make him afraid."
American leaders were not always so welcoming, however.
In 1861, General Ulysses S. Grant expelled all Jews
from his war zone on flimsy accusations
of war profiteering,
despite the fact that Grant's own father worked
with Jewish businessmen.
Luckily, Lincoln interceded,
saying he did not like to hear a class
or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.
Grant would later disavow the order
and become the first president
to attend the dedication of a synagogue.
Jewish communities in America flourished
in the mid-1800s.
In New York alone, the Jewish population skyrocketed
from 6,000 in 1826 to over 50,000 by 1850.
Jews like Marcus Goldman
and the Lehman brothers built financial behemoths,
while Lazarus Straus and the Bloomingdale brothers
created massively successful department stores.
While these men built a vision of Jewish success,
a massive influx of poor Jewish immigrants
was just arising.
In 1881, the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II
precipitated hundreds of violent antisemitic pogroms
and the expulsion of Jews form Russian village.
This persecution forced
more than two and a half million Russian Jews
to flee to America.
In the United States, Jews became the heart
of the textile industry
and the political movements protesting it.
The sweatshops that covered the East Village
and other Jewish neighborhoods were brutal
and exhausting places
where dry fabric could go up like a tinderbox
as in the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
that burned 146 workers to death.
Brutal sweatshops and squalid tenements forced Jews
to reckon with the wide chasm between their lives
and the American dream.
And many of them decided to take action.
Emma Goldman inspired Yiddish-speaking workers to strike
while Abraham Cahan, editor of The Jewish Daily Forward
became a beacon for the working class struggle.
While Jews were pillars of socialist
and anarchist movements in New York,
and across the country,
many also worked within the system.
Oscar Straus became the first Jewish cabinet member
in 1906 and Louis Brandeis
was appointed the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice
a decade later,
becoming the first justice
to champion freedom of speech
and the right to privacy.
While Jews influenced the politics
and economics of America,
America also influenced what it meant to be Jewish.
Although the number of orthodox Jews in America today
make up nearly 10% of the Jewish population
and is growing rapidly thanks to demographic shifts,
Jews who immigrated in the 19th century tended
to be more secular.
In fact, observant Jews often described America
as the treifa medina, the unkosher land.
While many immigrant Jews did abandon their religion,
others built the American Reform Movement,
which redefined Judaism by declaring
that some traditional aspects,
such as kashrut were no longer binding.
Services were often predominantly in English,
rather than in Hebrew
and they emphasized social activism,
often portraying ritual commandments as obsolete.
In 1885, a group of influential rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh
declared that Reformed Jews
only had to follow the Torah's ethics
and not its commandments or rituals.
Reacting to this break from tradition,
a group of rabbis founded
the Jewish Theological Seminary Association
in order to preserve the knowledge
and practice of historical Judaism.
The school became the source
of the new conservative movement,
which embraced the observance of the Torah
but remained open to innovations in Jewish law.
For example, in the 1950s,
they started permitting Jews to drive
to synagogue on Shabbat
and in the 1980s, they began ordaining female rabbis.
As these movements grew and shifted,
they developed a distinct understanding
of what it meant to be Jewish in America.
Though Jews fled to America
to escape the suspicion and hatred they faced in Europe,
antisemitism proved hard to evade.
Jews were often barred from clubs,
turned away from hotels
and even excluded from certain professions
while Harvard and other universities instituted quotas
to limit Jewish enrollment.
In 1913, this bigotry turned deadly
after a man named Leo Frank
was falsely convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl,
despite an airtight alibi
and a confession from another man.
When the governor recognized Frank's clear innocence
and commuted his sentence,
a mob stormed the jail,
kidnapped Frank and lynched him from a tree.
Bigots also sought to keep Jews out of the country entirely.
Nativists pushed the Johnson-Reed Act
through Congress in 1924,
which severely constricted the immigration of Jews
from Eastern Europe while banning immigrants
from some Asian and African countries entirely.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir,
Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams
and a supporter
of the Immigration Restriction League claimed
that he wanted to keep out the furtive Jacob or Isaac
still reeking of the Ghetto,
snarling a weird Yiddish.
The Johnson-Reed Act remained in place
for 40 years
and turned the rush of Jewish immigrants into a trickle.
Yet many Jews who were already in the country
or who made it through the barriers managed to thrive.
They continued to suffer antisemitism,
particularly with the rise of the American Fascist Party
in the 1930s.
But they managed to knit their communities inextricably
into the American quilt.
Jews made up most of the founders
of Hollywood Studios
and wrote films like "Citizen Kane,"
and "Sunset Boulevard."
They pushed to eliminate the quota systems
and collaborated with icons
like Martin Luther King to fight for Civil Rights.
They built illustrious careers
across the arts, medicine, science, music and law,
pushing the fields forward into new possibilities.
While America is far from perfect,
it has become the second-largest homeland for Jews
in their long history.
It's home to around 7.5 million Jews
according to the Pew Research Center,
igniting a golden age
that rivals even the great Jewish communities
of the past.
[inspirational music]