Essay About Jewish American Experience And Time Jews

Philosophy 310 FinalEssay Preview: Philosophy 310 FinalReport this essayPaigeProf Steve HoffmanJewish American Experience 2061 May 2017America is one of the few places Jewish people have not to forced to leave. Jewish families have been immigrating here since 1654, and while they experienced hardship and discrimination here too, over time Jews have developed communities and become statistically much more successful than the average American. The Jewish community makes up only 2% of US population, but 25% of top 400 wealthiest Americans are Jewish. Having come so far, what was it like to be a Jewish immigrant? Historically, how did Jewish people get to where they are today? In The American Jew Oscar Janowsky writes “the American pattern of tolerance and good will captured the imagination of the Jews at an early date … in free America, he learned to respect the faith of his neighbor, and expected equal regard for Judaism” (16). This is a very rosy view of Jewish immigration, but when put in the context of the persecution Jews have faced elsewhere it starts to make sense.

For some background, Jewish immigrants have had a rough history of being persecuted everywhere they went. Before even coming to America and dealing with the hardships they faced there, Jews were driven away and looked down on in Europe and Russia. As Ruth Gay, winner of the National Jewish book Award, puts it, “The Jews everywhere were regarded as a strange people, set apart from the Christian world in which they lived. Mysterious in their separateness and in their long, wandering history, they were looked on with a mixture of fear and hatred by ordinary people” (1). Gay describes rumors and old stories passed around, stories that Jews had tails and furry bodies, or used christian blood to make matzah for passover. These tales were intended to suggest that Jews were devil like and evil, to isolate Jewish people from their Goy neighbors. These cruel stories turned into outright blame and hateful scapegoating when stories began to circulate that evil Jews had poisoned the wells and caused the black plague. This led to riots and ultimately an order to for Jews to leave the towns they lived in.

This demand for Jews to pack their bags and find somewhere else to live occured over and over. Even in Spain where the Jews did well for themselves for generations, growing rich and living peaceful lives, the Arab rule was eventually overthrown and Jews were persecuted again. When the Christians came back into power Jews were forced to convert to Christianity and were mistrusted and called “amaranos” (accursed pigs) for generations afterwards. Eventually Queen Isablla of Castile and her husband King Ferdinand of Aragon decreed that all Jews must leave their kingdom within 3 months.

Jewish communities were turned away from Portugal and Brazil among other places before eventually coming to the New World and settling in New Amsterdam (soon to be New York) in 1654. This was the 1st Jewish community in the United States, numbering 23 men, women, and children from South America (Janowsky). Later on in the 19th Century there was a flood of Jewish immigration from German close to 200,000 Jews, all fleeing to escape poverty and oppression. From 1880 to 1920 there was also Russian immigration of about two million due to similar issues of hardship and discrimination and limitations on Jewish marriage. In short, Jews have been coming to America to escape persecution for years, ever since they first saught shelter in the new world.

Even their beginnings in New Amsterdam were rough. The Jews were charged extra money for their passage by ship, and when they couldn’t pay the fee their belongings were auctioned. Kind Dutch citizens bought the belongings at low prices and returned them to their owners, but the captian realized what was going on and decided to imprison two Jews until the debt was paid. However, once there the Jewish community was given official permission from the Dutch West India Company to remain in America, and from that point on the community blossomed.

As time went on this determined Jewish attitude persisted, and new Jewish immigrants did not lay down and give in to their hardships either. It seems to be a characteristic of the Jewish community to work hard to better one’s situations and learn from mistakes made. Prominent scholar and literature professor Charles Bernheimer describes an instance of this, explaining how during the ‘longshoremen’s strike of 1882 Jews didn’t know what strikes were and blindly took the places of employees on strike, but once they understood what was going on they joined the strike. “No sooner, however, had the situation been explained to the ‘scabs’ than they abandoned their wheelbarrows, amid the appluase of the striking Gentiles” (Bernheimer 34). The struggle of starting a life in America

The Jews of the nineteenth century—of course, the first to start a family, and the first ones to grow up as infants or children—were not necessarily the easiest to get along with. In Britain and the United States, there could be just as many Jewish children, if not more, but there were, according to statistics published in 1900, only 19 percent of all Jewish boys and nine percent of Jews of mixed descent.

In Russia a very different problem lay. In the early twenty-first century, the Soviet Union was preparing an ideal for an increasing Jewish population and was planning a state with Jewish immigration, as well. As I have stated in the past, the Soviet Union was well within the reach of its “Jewish” immigration target. There were just as many Jews in the country as there were Jews in the United States. The Soviet Union’s Jewish population had reached an average of 3,000—and their rate was in the range of that of the United States. This is the lowest rate in the world (a rate that, according to the Russian official statistics, is equivalent to a rate of nearly 40 people per hundred thousand inhabitants). The fact that the Jewish population of the Soviet Union in the twenty-first century has not reached the low level envisioned of the United States suggests there might be other Jewish immigrants in the future.

The Soviet Union didn’t have any other viable means for a Jewish population than a state or army, or government or factory. But this does not necessarily mean that Jews of this generation were going to assimilate into the Soviet Union. One reason being that Soviet Jews were being persecuted and persecuted.

There was little choice for the Jews of the United States to leave the Soviet Union. This was possible because of the strong Soviet government’s support for the Jewish community of the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, it was important for the Jews in the United States to be able to live independently, not be subject to the pressure of the European colonialist empire. The British government had spent much of the twentieth century working hard for the goal of building new European settlements on these lands. The British government had not allowed them to be used as slaves, but they could use the land to build a Jewish ghetto in the United States.

The United States also had an established Jewish community in the early twenties in New York City, and it was growing rapidly. The city was beginning to lose its Jewish presence on the whole. By the end of the nineteenth century there were no fewer than 200 Jewish businesses in America,[4] and even more Jews were working there. The result was that more and more Jewish businesses in America made the decision to turn their operation outward to America, such that the Jews of that generation, in the form of the Jewish Federations (Jewish Cemeteries and Jewish schools, Jewish centers) began opening new Jewish businesses there.

The pressure of America’s colonialist government was causing the Jewish community in America to get its foot in the door. It had no way of