Coming to America
In America, Jewish immigrants “created their own world out of the Old World they remembered and the New World they discovered” (Antler). Their nostalgia for lives taken away from them intermingled with hopefulness for a safer future. They had more space, more freedom, more food – but they negotiated that bounty alongside Ashkenazi tradition. This insular world-building was both cause and effect of Jewish-Americans’ otherizing.
First- and second-generation Jewish immigrants established communities where residents weren’t necessarily synagogue members but lived Jewish lives via osmosis: they shopped at kosher butchers and saw Hebrew lettering on signs and advertisements. They found working class jobs, acted as peddlers, and adopted socialist mentalities. They lived in row apartments and dressed in modest attire. They were, to themselves and outsiders, obviously Jewish. This identifier was captured in census records and immigration cards: most of these Jews were Yiddish speaking, catalogued as being of the "Hebrew" race, and noted of being of "medium” complexion, though they were from Europe and had white skin. And, reflecting nothing if not anti-Semitism, neighborhoods Jewish immigrants lived in were frequently labeled as "dangerous” by the Federal Housing Authority, a term reserved for non-white areas in the country. Residents of urban Jewish enclaves could not access home loans, were excluded from institutions of higher education, and faced what we'd now call structural oppression.
Over time, Jews came to define themselves as both Jewish and American, abandoning elements of observance. While food remained means of marking Jewish identity in the United States, offering both “substance and substantiation” (Harris-Shapiro), keeping strictly kosher was one of the first cultural ties to fade. Likewise was language, with later generations preferring English over Yiddish. Shedding these customs, immigrants’ descendants become more and more culturally “American,” all while Ashkenazi Jews sought upward mobility and began to benefit from their whiteness.
“Jewish immigrants…turned their attention away from the old country and toward the new. In doing so, they sought to strike roots in American soil, acquiring property, establishing businesses, building families, and founding communal institutions. They also came to identify themselves, often enthusiastically, as Americans and embraced what they saw as the fundamental American values of freedom, democracy, equality, and voluntarism.”
– Soyer on the tension between transnationalism, keeping European tradition alive, and Americanization