Within the vast literature on both German-speaking immigrants to this country and on Jews in America, relatively less attention has been paid to the intersection of these two groups, German-speaking Jews. This conference will examine the experience of this large and historically important group of immigrants from the mid-19th century into the 20th. In particular, we will focus on the creation, recreation, and negotiation of a complex set of interlocking, overlapping identities: linguistic, national, regional, religious and ethnic.
A number of senior and younger scholars contributing to this area will present papers. The conference will be firmly anchored in History, but with strong connections to immigrant, ethnic and urban studies, as well as other neighboring disciplines.
Thursday, October 26
University Club, 803 State Street, on the Library Mall
6:30 p.m. Dinner and Welcoming Remarks
Dr. Joseph C. Salmons, Director, Max Kade Institute
Dr. Christof Mauch, Acting Director, German Historical Institute
8:30 p.m. Keynote Address, University Club
Henry Feingold, Graduate School, CUNY
Director, Jewish Resource Center, Baruch College
German Jews and the American Jewish Synthesis
All plenary sessions will be held in the Memorial Union, 800
Langdon Street
The conference is free and open to the public.
Friday, October 27
8:30 - 9:00 a.m. Registration and coffee
9:00 - 10:30 a.m. I. Community Formation
Moderator: Christof Mauch
Leah Hagedorn, Tulane University
"We Allow No German Jews to Settle Among Us": Reconstructing
and Deconstructing Confederate Civilian Anti-Semitism During the
American Civil War
10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. II. Gender
Moderator: Karen Jankowsky
Anke Ortlepp, University of Cologne
"Give to the Poor! Yourself You'll Bless!": Jewish
Charities in Milwaukee 1865-1920
Karla Goldman, Jewish Women's Archive
Patterns of Philanthropy: Nineteenth-Century Women's Societies
in Germany and the United States
Lunch break
1:45 - 4:30 p.m. III. Community Evolution
Moderator: Marc Silberman
Gerhard Grytz, University of Nevada
"Whose Frontier?": Experiences of
Gentile and Jewish German Immigrants in Arizona during the 19th Century
Tobias Brinkmann, University of Leipzig
"We are Brothers! Let us Separate":
"German Jews" in Chicago between Einheitsgemeinde and Network-Community
1847-1923
Break
Ruth Goldman, University of Wisconsin
"And These Were Jews?": A Documentary Film in Progress
about the German-American Jewish Community of Cincinnati
Saturday, October 28
8:30 - 9:00 a.m. Registration
9:00 - 10:30 a.m. IV. German Jewish Institutions
Moderator: David Sorkin
Cornelia Wilhelm, University of Munich
Shaping the American Jewish Community: The
Independent Order of B'nai B'rith 1843-1914
Derek Penslar, University of Toronto
Brahmin Philanthropists: The Leadership of
the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
10:45 a.m. -12:15 p.m. V. Biographies
Moderator: Tony Michaels
Mitch Hart, Florida International University
A Jew Grows in Brooklyn: German Science and
American-Jewish Identity
Bobbie Malone, Wisconsin State Historical Society
Russians, Race, and Reform: The Making of
a Southern Zionist in 1890s New Orleans
Lunchbreak
1:45 - 3:15 p.m. VI. Theater and Culture
Moderator: Cora Lee Nollendorfs
Harley Erdman, University of Massachusetts
German Jews and American Show Business: A
Reconsideration
Thomas Kovach, The University of Arizona
German Jews and Ostjuden in the American South:
Alfred Uhry's "Last Night of Ballyhoo"
3:30 - 5:00 p.m. VII. Contemporary Perspectives
Moderator: Joe Salmons
Monika Schmid, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
"I always thought I was a German - it
was Hitler who taught me I was a Jew: " National-socialist Persecution,
Identity, and the German Language
7:00 - 10:00 p.m. Film and Discussion - Grainger Hall, Room
2120, 975 University Avenue
Moderator: Mary Devitt
Manfred Kirchheimer, Independent Filmmaker
We Were So Beloved : The German-Jews of Washington
Hts., New York
Henry Feingold
German Jews and the American Jewish Synthesis
I want to suggest, hopefully without overstating it, that the basic terms of the Jewish encounter with America -- its strategy and its modalities -- were initially set down by the rustic Bayern, Hessians and Alsatians of Jewish faith who arrived on these shores in numbers after the 1820s.
Gerhard Grytz
"Whose Frontier?": Experiences of Gentile and Jewish
German Immigrants in Arizona during the 19th Century
Historical studies on Jewish immigrants in the
American West are plentiful. The majority of these studies neither
distinguish German-speaking Jews as a separate group nor do they
acknowledge their affinity to Gentile Germans. A different approach,
however, shows that Jewish and Gentile Germans, together, "transplanted"
nineteenth-century social structures, cultural values, and economic
attitudes to the American West. This group of immigrants, overwhelmingly
consisting of Jewish German merchants and Gentile German artisans,
promoted "home-style" capitalistic ideas and values.
In the case of Arizona, despite being a minority, they significantly
influenced the socio-economic development of the Territory as
a result of their advanced economic status. Together with other
ethnic groups, the "Arizona Germans" played a substantial
part in creating a new and unique regional "Creole Culture"
in the American Southwest that was neither the product of a Turnerian
confrontation between the individual and the frontier environment
nor the result of assimilation to supposedly "dominant"
Anglo-American values.
"We are Brothers! Let us Separate.": "German Jews" in Chicago between "Einheitsgemeinde" and Network-Community 1847-1923
After the 1840s Jews in the United States organized communities
increasingly beyond the religious sphere on ethnic terms. Jewish
immigrants lamented the loss of close-knit Jewish "Gemeinschaft"
and praised, sometimes in the same breath, the unique possibilities
in the United States to form new Jewish communities. The paper
will analyze the centrifugal and centripetal forces that influenced
Jewish community-building in America's fastest growing city between
1847 and 1923. While Jewish immigrants individually had close
relationships with other German-speaking immigrants and helped
to organize the short lived German "umbrella"-community,
the Jewish community was never a part of the German community.
The paper questions the bipolar model of interpreting modern Jewish
history by asserting that "assimilation" led not to
the disintegration but rather to the transformation of Jewish
"community" into what Arthur Ruppin characterized as
"new [Jewish] milieux." The paper is based on my dissertation:
"Wir amerikanisch-deutsche Juden": Jewish immigrants
in Chicago 1840-1900 (TU Berlin, 2000).
Shaping the American Jewish Community: The Independent Order of B'nai B'rith, 1843-1914
Founded in 1843 by German immigrants to the United States,
the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith constituted the first and
largest national American Jewish organization in nineteenth-century
America, providing a platform for sociability and mutual support,
a network of communication, representation and community for American
Jews. Created as a fraternal lodge, it addressed a membership
composed of diverse religious or denominational affiliation, ethnicity,
or class, and defined a practical Judaism stressing a strong universalism
and could embrace more than just one fraction of the diverse American
Jewish groups. The paper will discuss how this organization helped
to shape the young community structurally, for example by substituting
old-fashioned concepts of "community" with a modern
organizational framework, which allowed the American Jew to maintain
a Jewish identity while adapting to American forms, or by balancing
the economic and social situation of small and needy communities.
It will explore how the organization succeeded in giving the young
community a new vision of its role in America of raising the individual's
self-awareness of his potential as a Jew in American society,
continuously blending its mission with the general understanding
of religiosity and with American Civil Religion and the limits
of such activity.
Derek Penslar
Brahmin Philanthropists: The Leadership of the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee
During the interwar period, the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee was the most powerful Jewish philanthropy
in the United States and the second wealthiest in the world (behind
the London-based Jewish Colonization Association). This paper
will analyze the leadership style, operating methods, and goals
of the Joint. Although the Joint's hierarchical managerial style
caused friction with American Zionists, the goals of the JDC and
American Zionism overlapped considerably. An examination of some
of the Joint's most prominent leaders - including Felix Warburg
and James Rosenberg - and of the Joint's activities in Palestine
and Eastern Europe, will reveal that the Joint was viscerally
linked with many aspects of the Zionist project.
A Jew Grows in Brooklyn: German Science and American-Jewish Identity
Early on in the 1997 novel The Actual, Saul Bellow's
narrator is describing his first encounter with the elderly millionaire
Adletsky. "In the New World, [Adletsky's] immigrant melting-pot
malnourished teeny-weenies produced six-foot sons and large, luxuriant
daughters. I myself was both larger and heavier than my parents,
though internally more fragile, perhaps." Bellow is reproducing
here, in highly abbreviated form, a standard set of images and
ideas from the scientific literature of the early twentieth century.
This paper explores this scientific literature, and the theme
of America as the place of Jewish physical and psychological regeneration.
While American Jewish social scientists accepted to one degree
or another the standard image of the modern Jew as degenerate,
they sought to prove through science that the American environment
would exert a meliorative effect on the Jewish body and mind.
The Jew would literally grow in New York and elsewhere, if allowed
to enjoy the political and social freedoms associated with the
New World. The paper focuses on the reciprocity between scientific
studies produced in Germany and the United States in the first
decades of the twentieth century, the role of German science in
shaping a particular sort of American-Jewish social science, and
the politics impelling this social science.
Russians, Race, and Reform: The Making of a Southern Zionist in 1890s New Orleans
Rabbi Max Heller was a man of both passionate conviction and inner contradiction. In his public life, he consistently sought center stage, sometimes as an agitator, and sometimes as a mediator. During his first two decades in the United States, Heller confronted some of the major social problems that dominated the late nineteenth century--emancipation and racism, nationalism and nativism, immigration and assimilation--issues that remain unresolved even today. In grappling with these issues, he found his own voice.
In his Germanized Jewish upbringing in Prague and in his rabbinical
training at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Heller had imbibed
the principles of a rationalized, liberal, and universalist Judaism.
From the vantage point of his pulpit at Temple Sinai in New Orleans,
his perspective began to change. By the turn of the century, these
ideals no longer seemed adequate guidance in a world increasingly
threatened by ethnic and racial nationalism. Earlier than most,
Heller realized that such nationalism would ultimately cause European
Jewry to be scapegoated. At the same time he recognized that the
spiritual roots of his faith were embedded in traditions casually
abandoned by the Jewish reformers who had come of age at midcentury.
Their sanitized Judaism now appeared sterile. As the twentieth
century dawned, the coincidence of local, regional, national,
and international events created an epiphany for Heller. At midlife,
these events impressed upon him the profound cultural as well
as religious implications of the contemporary Jewish experience.
Integrating his new conception of Judaism and its mission, he
became a passionate Zionist and an ardent humanitarian, a risk-taker
who championed social justice and defended the underdog. This
paper will discuss the precipating incidents in this epiphany,
which centered around a small group of Russian Jews who had recently
immigrated to New Orleans.
German Jews and American Show Business: A Reconsideration
Many accounts of the prominent roles Jews played in early 20th
century American show business -- as performers, writers, composers,
directors, and producers -- ascribe the phenomenon to a kind of
lower-east-side "ghetto energy," linking these entertainment
forms to a rising generation of Eastern European immigrants while
noting the influence of Yiddish theater in particular and yiddishkeit
in general. This paper reconsiders this popular narrative, arguing
instead that many of the country's most influential and successful
Jewish show business figures came from relatively assimilated
German or Central European backgrounds (often from locations outside
New York City). It suggests that the roots of "Jewish"
show business in the United States may be more German than has
been commonly assumed. The paper also considers why performing
artists and historians alike have tended to "Yiddishize"
the Jewish experience in American show business.
German Jews and the Ostjuden in the American South: Alfred Uhry's Play 'The Last Night of Ballyhoo'
Alfred Uhry's Tony Award-winning play presents a family of well-to-do German Jews in 1939 Atlanta. As Hitler's armies are invading Poland to start the Second World War, the consequences of which are well known to the play's audience but unknown to the characters in the play, the family of Adolph (!) Freitag is discussing the arrival of Clark Gable et al. for the opening of Gone with the Wind. Thoroughly acculturated, they speak disparagingly about the "other sort" of Jews, those of Eastern European descent who live on the wrong side of town, represented in the play by the Brooklyn Jew Joe Farkas, the family firm's newest employee, who is amazed to see a Christmas tree in their home, and whose Yiddish expressions are met with blank stares by the family. In the course of the play, a romance arises between Joe and Sunny, the younger daughter of the Freitag clan, which serves to highlight the gulf separating the worlds they come from.
I will examine the play as a mirror of the tensions between
the older German-Jewish families in the South and the more recent
arrivals, examining Uhry's presentation in light of historical
research on Jewish life in the South. However, I will argue as
well that the tension between German Jews and Ostjuden represented
in the play replicates to a remarkable extent the tensions between
Eastern and Western Jews within Germany and Austria during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, I will discuss the
play's ending, a kind of wish-fantasy in which Joe, Sunny, and
the whole family join in saying blessings over a Shabbat dinner,
a scene inconceivable in light of the family attitudes represented
in the rest of the play.
"I always thought I was a German
- it was Hitler who taught me I was a Jew": National-socialist
Persecution, Identity, and the German Language
This paper will present the findings of a study on language use
and language loss of German Jews who left Germany during the Nazi
regime and have lived in English-speaking countries ever since.
The study of individuals forgetting a language they grew up with
(first language attrition) has only been a research topic for
the past twenty years, and the influence of personal factors like
age at the time of emigration, intermediate language contact,
and personal attitudes is still very much in debate. This paper
argues that the breakdown of a language system after sixty years
of non-use or restricted use is to a large degree determined by
personal attitudes.
We Were So Beloved : The German-Jews of Washington Hts., New York
A film by Manfred Kirchheimer
This unique documentary examines the experiences of German-Jewish
refugees who fled their country in the 1930's and settled
in New York's Washington Heights. Having assimilated in Germany,
they found themselves living exclusively among Jews
for the first time, and were called "more German than Jewish."
Today these people who lost so much are secure and patriotic
Americans. In frank conversation they discuss the trauma of leaving
their homeland, the difficulties adapting to life in the U.S.,
the relief and remorse of having escaped the Holocaust, and the
moral and emotional implications of their survival. This
important film fills a gap in American social history, showing
us the story of this brave group of survivors.
145 Minutes, Color