The Jewish Legacy in American History

Jewish Americans have made contributions to American society that far exceed their percentage of our country’s population. This is a minority culture that has touched every aspect of American society, from the arts, to medicine and science, to business, to sports, to literature and civil rights campaigns and organizations, to the enrichment of our language with Yiddish terms, and to our national cuisine with bagels and pastrami sandwiches. In this issue of History Now, as in past issues that highlight the contributions of other groups that make up our diverse and dynamic culture, we offer a glimpse of the role of Jewish Americans in enriching American society.

In their two essays, Professors Hasia Diner and Michael Hoberman provide accounts of the earliest settlements of Jews in the colonial era. Although antisemitism appeared in newspapers and in public discussion, and full citizenship was often denied them, there were few serious restrictions on how Jews could make their living and no denial of their right to practice their faith in the British colonies. It was this liberality that led many Jews to remain loyal to the Crown when independence was declared, although an equal number likely supported the Revolution. When the war ended, Jews wondered: what was to be their status in the new nation? George Washington endorsed religious toleration and the Constitution rejected any religious test for officeholding. In fact, as most Americans today know, our founding document’s “We the People” did not exclude anyone based on religious faith. The First Amendment codified the free exercise of religion and guaranteed that no faith would be established as a national religion. Although the Naturalization Act of 1790 did not protect nonwhite immigrants, it did free the way for Jews to come to the United States. Antisemitism did not disappear but it was not institutionalized and thus did not prevent Jews from taking advantage of citizenship and economic and cultural opportunity.

As Professor Andrew Porwancher shows us in his essay, “Alexander Hamilton and the Civic Status of Jews in the Early Republic,” Alexander Hamilton embraced the religious and civic tolerance embodied by the Bill of Rights. In a courtroom where he was defending a Jewish merchant, Louis Le Guen, Hamilton challenged the religious bigotry that emerged in his opposing counsel’s presentation. Although Gouverneur Morris had written the preamble to the Constitution, he now relied on antisemitism to convict Hamilton’s client. In his eloquent rebuttal of Morris’s approach, Hamilton reminded the packed courtroom that Lady Justice was blind to “all differences of faiths or births, of passions or of prejudices.” He was, in effect, calling on the jury to honor the revolutionary promise of equality. Hamilton was in good company in his insistence on respect for religious diversity. Earlier, in 1790, the country’s first president, George Washington, had assured the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island that “the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

Although historians cannot say for certain, it is possible that Hamilton himself had a Jewish identity in his younger years. We do know that he had attended a Jewish school and thus had a solid exposure to Jewish community life as a young man. A Christian in his adulthood, Hamilton retained a lifelong reverence for the Jewish faith and a deep commitment to civic equality in the new nation.

In “Hometown Societies in the New World: Jewish Landsmanshaftn and Americanization,” Professor Daniel Soyer takes us to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century emigration of nearly two and a half million Jews to the United States. Like other immigrant groups, these Jews from Eastern Europe found their acculturation to American society eased by the work of neighborhood Jewish organizations. There were thousands of these landsmanshaftn—3000 in New York City alone, but hundreds more in other American cities. They may have conducted their meetings in Yiddish but these organizations followed a familiar American model of mutual-aid societies and democracy was their core value. Some were religiously oriented; others had radical politics as their main theme. Some were for men only; others were mixed. But the goal of all of these organizations was to help immigrants adjust to their new home. The landsmanshaftn provided low-cost medical services, offered financial aid, ran funerals, and maintained Jewish cemeteries. They were also centers for social life, including everything from picnics to banquets. But in doing their work well, these organizations faced their own demise, for the American-born second generations in these families had no need for their aid. By the twenty-first century, they were largely a part of Jewish history.

The Jewish contributions to American culture in modern times have been wide ranging but often not conflict free. In his essay entitled “Jewish Athletes and the Challenges of American Sports,” Professor Jeffrey Gurock explores the tensions between the demands of traditional Judaism (such as dietary laws, observation of the Sabbath, and the assumption that intellect was far more important than physical prowess) and the demands made on athletes in every sport (often including seven-day-a-week practice sessions, high-carb meals that disregarded kosher rules, and games and tournaments scheduled on the Sabbath). Greats like Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax illustrate this conflict. While the immigrant Jewish community showed “reverence for the head, for the intellect,” schools stressed physical training as a path to values like self-reliance and teamwork. Gurock uses Hank Greenberg as an example of the Jewish athlete’s dilemma: as his fame on the ballfield grew, Greenberg moved away from the demands of strict religious observance. But in 1934, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Greenberg refused to join his team on the field. In 1965, Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax faced a similar choice and, like Greenberg, refused to play on this High Holy day. Today, Gurock notes, the choice by Jewish athletes to play or not to play on Jewish holidays has become a way of measuring their commitment to traditional Judaism. Antisemitism sometimes led Jewish athletes to make public commitments to their religious faith. Gurock points to Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman who responded to a refusal of the Olympic committee in 2012 to allow Israeli athletes to memorialize the 1972 tragedy when Palestinian terrorists murdered eleven Israeli athletes. Raisman sent her own message as a proud Jew by using “Hava Nagila,” a widely known Jewish tune, as the musical accompaniment to her gold medal gymnastic performance.

In “The Jewish Health Professionals of Cincinnati,” Professor Frederic Krome highlights both the role the first Jewish hospital in the US played in pioneering psychological treatments for children and young adults and the individual contribution of Dr. Albert Sabin of the University of Cincinnati Medical School in eradicating polio. Krome traces the professionalization of medical education from the nineteenth century’s reliance on self-taught physicians to the rise in the Progressive era of medical schools with high admissions and graduation standards. The Jewish Hospital of Cincinnati was early in its advocacy of rigorous training and of specialization. In 1900, it boasted departments in Surgical, Gynecological, Neurological, Eye-Ear-Nose-Throat, Pediatrics, Obstetrics, and even Dental specialties. At a time when many American medical schools were placing strict limits on the number of Jewish students, the University of Cincinnati rejected this antisemitism and appointed Alfred Friedlander as the Hospital’s Chief of Staff.

Although the role of Jews in medicine might not be widely known, most Americans recognize the contributions Jews made to the field of entertainment. In her essay, “The Jewish Imprint on American Musical Theater,” Professor Elizabeth Wollman takes a deep dive into the history of Jewish composers and lyricists who gave us many of the most beloved Broadway musicals. The disproportionate number of Jewish immigrants or children of immigrants who played a major role in musical theater included twentieth-century composers like Harold Rome, Irving Berlin, Kander and Ebb, and Comden and Green, who drew on a wide variety of musical styles including jazz, opera, classical music, gospel, blues, and folk to produce memorable songs. These composers came from both rich and poor backgrounds. Jerome Kern, for example, was a middle-class Manhattanite born to immigrant parents, while Irving Berlin grew up in such poverty that he quit school at the age of eight to help support the family as a peddler and a singing waiter. Even non-Jewish composers recognized the centrality of their Jewish contemporaries; Cole Porter, Wollman tells us, once confessed that his secret to success was to try to compose “Jewish tunes.” The musicals written by these Jewish composers did not primarily focus on Jewish life or culture. Yet subtle references to this heritage does appear. The opening bars of Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story quote the Rosh Hashanah “Tekiah g’dolah” shofar blast. Many characters, not labeled Jewish, can be read as Jews, including, Professor Wollman notes, the brooding outsider Jud Fry in Oklahoma! and the many lost and anxious characters in Stephen Sondheim’s works. Jewish composers, Wollman concludes, did not seek to impose their culture on their audiences; they simply wanted to send those audiences away feeling happy and emotionally moved.

In “The Role of Jewish Americans in the Civil Rights Movement,” Professor Cheryl Greenberg provides us with an in-depth account and analysis of the participation of Jews in the struggles for racial equality. The roll call of civil rights leaders includes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Rabbi Joachim Prinz who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, and civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who, along with African American James Chaney, were brutally murdered during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Jack Greenberg worked with Thurgood Marshall to convince the Supreme Court to desegregate public schools, and Chuck McDew, an African American Jew, served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1960 to 1963. Greenberg traces the emergence of collaboration between African Americans and Jews, begun at the end of the nineteenth century when Jim Crow laws spurred the Great Migration north by Blacks and antisemitism spurred the arrival of almost two million Jews to this country. Among the White founders and early leaders of the NAACP, for example, a disproportionate number were Jewish, including Lillian Wald, Emil Hirsch, and Stephen Wise. Later in the twentieth century, the Cold War strengthened support for civil rights. Equality for all became the goal, and Jewish and Black legal groups worked together to challenge segregation in colleges, housing, and other arenas of American life. Close to half of the lawyers working in Civil Rights Movement projects in the South were Jewish. In some ways, Greenberg notes, “civil rights became a way to define one’s Jewishness” as religious observance diminished for these activists.

As always, the essays in History Now are supplemented by materials from the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s archives, including lesson plans and spotlighted primary sources from Gilder Lehrman Collection. The issue’s special feature is a pair of recent video presentations on important facets of Jewish American history and experience: 

• “Jewish American Soldiers and Jewish Refugees after World War II” with Melanie Meyers, Deputy Director and Chair of Collections and Engagement at the American Jewish Historical Society, and Deborah Dash Moore, the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History at the University of Michigan (Episode of Inside the Vault, an online program that highlights unique primary sources from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, May 2, 2024)
• “Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader” with Daniel Greene, President and Librarian at the Newberry Library, and Edward Phillips, former Director of the Exhibitions Program at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Episode of Book Breaks, a weekly interview series with renowned scholars discussing their latest publications, October 22, 2023)

 We hope that you will enjoy this addition to our series on contributions by diverse groups to our national history. We wish you a restorative summer of picnics, swimming, travel, or study, and we look forward to seeing you again in the fall.

Carol Berkin, Editor, History Now
Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, Baruch College & the Graduate Center, CUNY

Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, History Now
Senior Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History