Mazel Tov: 350 Years of Jews in America

New York Times ^ | September 3, 2004 | JEREMY EICHLER

[OESY]

In a way, catching a ride is how it all began. Fleeing the threat of Portuguese violence, 23 Jewish refugees boarded the Sainte Catherine, a ship that was setting sail for New Amsterdam. They arrived in the Dutch colony almost exactly 350 years ago on Sept. 12, 1654.

They were hardly welcomed with open arms, at least not by the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who tried to expel these "blasphemers of the name of Christ." But enough of his superiors in the Dutch West India Company thought otherwise: the Jews were allowed to stay, becoming the founding members of what would grow into the North American Jewish community.

The next three centuries witnessed an amazingly rich and complex American Jewish history: an encounter that would forever invest new meaning in the adjectives Jewish and American. This history and the 350th anniversary itself are being celebrated in New York this year, beginning on Tuesday with a concert at the 92nd Street Y that opens the first annual New York Jewish Music and Heritage Festival. The festival continues in 15 venues around the city, lasting through Sept. 14, and the Y's celebrations will stretch throughout its entire 2004-5 season.

As a wide variety of events will convey, the story of American Jews became a tale of the passage from the periphery to the center, from immigrant yearning to mainstream achievement. And the journey ultimately transformed this country's Jews as deeply as it did the aspects of American culture they helped to invent. The diverse community today reflects all that was gained in transition but also what was lost in the process of normalization, as a diaspora people laid its roots and built a home more comfortable and secure than almost any other in its history.

The first immigrants to arrive were Sephardic Jews, followed in the 19th century by a large German Jewish migration, and finally the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe. Officially ending in 1924, this huge third wave of immigration had the greatest impact on the contours of the American Jewish experience, partly due to sheer numbers, and the cumulative shock of the new.

The majority of these Yiddish-speaking Jews came from remote areas in the Pale of Settlement, culturally isolated and often less modernized than their German-Jewish counterparts. They poured into the narrow streets and tenements of the Lower East Side, filling the jobs that were available to them, many of which were in the needle trades. Conditions were cramped, workdays endless, wages poor.

But despite the struggles, or perhaps because of them, a rich and now fabled cultural life arose from the Lower East Side. A thriving Yiddish press brought the immigrants news and politics in their own language, with special columns of advice for the newly arrived. The Yiddish theater boomed, pioneering a style of popular entertainment, with bittersweet stories of love and loss rendered with an expressive sweep that captivated audiences and offered a cherished few hours of escape.

The Yiddish theater had its own rich repertory, but there was also a tradition of Yiddishizing staples of the English stage. Shakespeare was "translated and improved" to produce wildly popular Yiddish-language versions of the classics interwoven with ethnic or religious themes. Jacob Gordin's "Jewish King Lear," for example, transformed the Shakespearean monarch into a Jewish paterfamilias from Vilna struggling to keep the peace among his three daughters.

The Yiddishized Shakespeare represented one immigrant impulse to translate the emblems of American life into a Jewish idiom, but the urge to translate in the other direction, from Jewish tradition into American life, was equally strong. Some immigrant families, for instance, took the religious fervor of the Old World and channeled it into political life.

Others set their sights on creating new forms of mass culture, with Hollywood of course as the most famous example. Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, and Jack and Harry Warner were among the prominent Jewish immigrants who helped build the new Tinseltown. In so doing, they turned the fears, dreams and fantasies of the newly arrived into mainstream weekend entertainment and helped to define a country's national psyche.

Similarly, on Broadway and in Tin Pan Alley, Jews rose to prominence, with leading figures like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Jerome Kern, Sophie Tucker and Oscar Hammerstein II, among many others. They built new fusions like "Show Boat" and later "Oklahoma!" that helped define the golden age of the Broadway musical. Others drew on the musical materials of their own ethnic and religious past to form the bricks and mortar of the burgeoning popular styles. A new book by Jack Gottlieb, "Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish," makes the connections explicit, with copious examples of cases where Yiddish songs and cantorial music were adapted, wittingly or unwittingly, by Jewish songwriters as they plied their craft in the mainstream. Sometimes the "accent" of the originals was preserved, oftentimes it was not.

Children of immigrants often continued the quest, moving forward from immigrant homes into a new Americanness that was beyond their parents' wildest imagining. Saul Bellow spoke Yiddish at home and then went to the public library to read Melville and Poe. Alfred Kazin made his name as a literary critic with "On Native Ground," a pathbreaking critical study of American literature. Aaron Copland left an immigrant home in Brooklyn to forge a new American classical music out of invented cowboy tunes, Shaker hymns and the story of a newlywed couple in the hills of Appalachia.

The examples of public achievement continue, with early radio (Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and Gertrude Berg), television (William S. Paley and David Sarnoff), comedy (the Marx brothers, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle). But such exercises in listmaking are inherently limited. They give the impression of telling us much while ultimately telling us little about the real significance of individual or collective participation in American cultural life. Instead, they merely encourage lingering by the glittering reflecting pools of ethnic pride.

Some observers have unfortunately gone further, using lists as a basis for speculation on the existence of a uniquely Jewish cultural sensibility, or specially honed talents for imitation, for empathy, for syntheses of high and low, or for the alienation at the heart of artistic modernism — as if these qualities could be packaged in the genes, or passed down through the generations like a secret recipe for matzo-ball soup. Even if these essential "Jewish" qualities are praised, the arguments tread on slippery ground. It's a short step toward reversing the terms of judgment and arriving at racist theories like the one advanced by Wagner in his anti-Semitic essay "Judaism in Music."

More fruitful explorations of American Jewish cultural achievement often consider social factors, the routes available to ethnic groups at particular stages in their acculturation. As Hasia Diner points out in her new book, "The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000," the Jewish immigrants' foray into the mainstream coincided with the explosion of growth in such new media as film, television and radio. The performing arts were also open to Jews in ways that other fields were not.

Even in the places where Jews undoubtedly achieved prominence, as in Hollywood, it is worth wondering whether they did so as Jews or as Americans. In loving the movies, did mainstream America learn to have Jewish dreams, or did the immigrant Jews of Hollywood simply learn to have American dreams? Two panel discussions this season at the 92nd Street Y (in October and November) will address these thorny questions about Jewish art, Jewish artists and their relationship to midcentury American culture.

After World War II, American Jews cheered from a distance the foundation of the state of Israel, whose embattled birth coincided with American Jews' collective pilgrimage to the suburbs. Success in acculturation soon became so complete that Jews began facing the challenges that lie on the opposite end of Americanization: how to preserve a sense of ethnic particularity amid the mainstream.

By the 1960's and 70's, memories of immigrant experiences were fading away, even as seminal books like Irving Howe's "World of Our Fathers" attempted to replenish the store. There was no masking, however, a sense that Jewish particularity was on the wane in America, whether measured in religious, cultural or even linguistic terms. In the novel "Operation Shylock," one of Philip Roth's characters put it starkly: "they had it in their heads to be Jews in a way that no one had ever dared to be a Jew in our three-thousand-year history; speaking and thinking American English, only American English, with all the apostasy that was bound to beget."

There was an important point here about the loss of traditional Jewish languages and literacy. But as it turned out, American English also proved a surprisingly resilient medium for new expressions of Jewish culture. The 1980's and 90's saw a renaissance in Jewish music, religious life and political engagement. Many of the artists presented in the coming weeks and months will reflect these new contours and fusions of Jewish memory and history with the folkways and found materials of American culture.

One example is the jazz saxophonist and composer John Zorn, who, like a handful of other experimental artists, has embraced a downtown-particularist impulse and incorporated Jewish themes into his work. (Mr. Zorn's excellent Masada String Trio will be featured on Wednesday.) Mr. Zorn's music defies easy categorization, and yet, with its heady mixture of klezmer, Middle Eastern and jazz influences, it may also suggest a metaphor for the ways that American Jews today grapple with the conflicted geography of memory.

At the core are competing ties to three homelands: the old homeland in Europe, for which a vicarious nostalgia lingers along with the ghosts of the Holocaust; the old-new homeland in Israel to which Jews are theologically and emotionally bound as surely as they are culturally distanced; and their actual homeland in this country, where comfort and its challenges have been unparalleled. The tension among these homelands, real and imagined, may be a source of both weakness and strength. It is certainly a reason for many Jews to harbor commitments to a certain outsider status in this country even as the tokens of insider privilege abound.

The tension will also animate the season of diverse cultural events. It is a fitting way of marking the anniversary of an arrival that the writer Mary Antin once imagined with a tweaking of traditional religious imagery: sitting in Russia, she dreamed of the waters of the Atlantic parting so that the Jews could arrive in the promised land of America. Almost a century after Antin and 350 years after the first Jewish settlers drifted ashore, the country's promise for Jews remains at once both fulfilled and elusive.

[TopQuark]

A Jew would not say mazel tov about that: (s)he would say, "lazman hazeh." And add, "Thank you G-d for sustaining me and enabling me to reach this day."

But references to G-d are forbidden in the New York Slimes.