Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 2: The lost history of American Jews

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

American Jews constitute the biggest, wealthiest, most influential and safest Jewish diaspora community in Jewish history, and also among the most Jewishly illiterate and profoundly anxious about their future.There's a good reason this immense and powerful community is also culturally weak and unsure of itself. There is deep history behind its illiteracy, a story of tragedy and trauma, rebellion and rebuilding.We unpack it all in this episode.Thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode in honor of those we lost on October 7th.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything

Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode two of Ask Chaviv Anything. The forgotten history of American Jews. That's our topic. We're going to cover answers to multiple questions asked by subscribers that all centered around this question of American Jews. How did American Jews become who they are, the institutions that they built, the culture,

and the trouble that American Jews are having facing this moment. It's a fascinating story, and one of the most fascinating things about this story is that American Jews seem convinced that it's not a fascinating story. It's one of the strangest things

about American Jewish culture, the quiet conviction that American Jews are actually very boring. What is American Jewry? What is its cultural identity? It's a question that can even seem hard to actually pin down as a question because

it's not hard to answer the question for the Jews of Yemen or the Jews of Russia or the Jews of Iraq or the Jews of Germany over the course of the centuries. There was a distinctly Jewish culture, even as they participated in the cultures around them and interacted with them. And in America, it's not clear that there is one outside of specifically religious observance.

And it goes deeper than that, the sense that there's an emptiness at the heart of the American Jewish experience. A sense that you hear from American Jews themselves. I'm not critiquing. This is a question American Jews ask and have asked me even when I've come to give a talk on history

to an American Jewish community somewhere. When I visit an American Jewish community, the single most important piece of feedback that I get, the single thing that I actually am told by the people I've spoken to is the statement, I don't know anything about my history. American Jewry is profoundly ignorant

about its own story, its own history, and doesn't produce American Jewish culture that is distinctly Jewish. Almost at all, outside again, of purely religious cultural life. And that's fascinating. I'm not critiquing.

I'm not coming to you and telling you, oh, it's terrible, American Jews, they're shallow. Their shallowness is purposeful. There was a moment in American Jewish history, and we will see it in which American Jewry chose to forget its history, chose to shed any distinctly Jewish culture in favor of Americanization, profound Americanization. American Jewry is also one of the most extraordinarily powerful, well-organized, organized, cohesive. Jewish diaspora is in the history of Jews, and certainly minorities in America,

with a multi-billion-dollar institutional edifice of vast charities, activist organizations, advocacy organizations, left-wing ones, right-wing ones. It's a community that is at one's extraordinarily strong, cohesive, has a powerful sense of self, and extraordinarily weak. And without that sense of self, it's a very confusing and strange community. And their strangeness is fascinating. And they're mistaken in thinking that they're boring. And we're going to learn that story today.

Before we dive in, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by Joe and Shira Lieberman to commemorate in each episode somebody who fell on October 7, 2023. Today we remember the father of my wife's dear friend Shaked Haram. His name was Avshalom Haran, Avshal, as everybody knew him, called him. Avshal was murdered on October 7 by Hamas terrorists who had infiltrated Kibbutz Beiri while he was standing in the door of his home, protecting his family, fighting to protect his family. Many members of the family were killed. Seven members of the family were taken. hostage that day. His wife Shoshan, their daughter Adi, Abshal's sister Sharon and her daughter Noam.

His son-in-law Tal, husband to Adi, and Adi's two children, Nevae, who was eight years old when he was taken hostage, and Jehel, who was three. Six of the seven were returned to us in the November twenty-twenty-three deal. The seventh, Tal, remains a hostage in God. and we pray for his return soon. Avshal was a noted economist. Avshal was a pillar of the kibbutz. Avshal was the CEO of something called Meshik Akibutsim, which was the commercial arm of the Kibbutz movement.

Avshal was the CEO of one of the largest printing presses in Israel, the printing press of Kibbutz Beiri, which is very, very well known. He was a man of tremendous kindness, a philanthropist, a doting father and grandfather. He is survived by his wife, three children, and five grandchildren. Who are American Jews? Where do they come from?

And why don't they know who they are and where they come from? We're going to read through a lot of history very fast to get to the meat of the story. The Russian Empire absorbed millions of Jews for the first time in the division of Poland. There were three specific divisions of Poland, 1772, 179. 93 and 1795. The empire had vast lands that had wanted to populate with subjects of the empire

because it had recently conquered those lands from the Ottomans, and they encouraged the Jews to move to those areas. They founded new cities like Odessa, and they encouraged Jews to populate them. Jewish traders were forbidden, actually, from entering into

what was called inner Russia, eastward toward Moscow, toward the provinces that are almost entirely Russian ethnically at the time. And so the Jews move southward. They colonize what is today southern Ukraine all the way up to southern Belarus, the Crimean Peninsula,

the area in which the Jews are permitted from the time of Catherine the Great to live and cannot live outside of it. But even though the Jews were Russian subjects and doing the bidding of the empire, their own lives were very, very severely curtailed in terms of the professions they could serve in in terms of the places they could live, in terms of the economic activity they could

take part in. The payless settlement continues. It is the policy of Catherine. It is the policy of the czars who would come after Nicholas I, Alexander I, Alexander I. And then we get to Alexander the second in the middle of the 19th century. He's a profoundly reformist czar. He abolished serfdom in 1861. Merchants in 1859 were given the right to join professional guilds. In 1861, university students, medical professionals were allowed to move into the big cities. In 1865, that was expanded to certain craftsmen. In other words, people who were deemed useful to the empire,

useful to the urban economies of the empire were given many, many more opportunities than most Jews. Most Jews were still very, very restricted. But because Alexander II had a general liberal attitude and generally also wanted Russia to catch up very quickly to the Central European kingdoms and empires into Western Europe,

Jewish intellectuals held out real profound hope that the imperial administration that Alexander II was pushing toward that modernization would abolish the pale of settlement and allow the Jews to take a full part in the life of the Russian Empire. And then Alexander II in 1881 is killed, is assassinated by an anarchist group in St. Petersburg.

His son, Alexander the. The third takes power. His son was raised by Eastern Orthodox conservatives and led a profound reaction within the imperial administration that included many, many different aspects of rolling back his father's policies, but one of them was toward the Jews. The May laws of 1881, restricted where Jews could live, reinforced the palest settlement,

rolled back some of the things that his father had done to allow more Jews to have more freedom of movement within the empire. there were more restrictions there were entire cities that jews were suddenly expelled from that were excluded from the pail of settlement in which they could live for example yalta in eighteen ninety three rostov in eighteen ninety one and ninety two thousands of jewish craftsmen and their families were kicked out of moscow and st petersburg because they were simply no longer allowed to live there it was a turning on the jews that was accompanied that was the top-down attack on the jews under alexander the third but it was accompanied from 1881 on by pogroms against the Jews, of violent outbursts of popular violence throughout the Southern Empire, what was called the Southern Empire, essentially present-day Western and Southern Ukraine. The first pogrom in mid-April of 1881 begins in Elizabeth'sgrad,

and many, many more famous pogroms would follow in Kiev and Odessa and perhaps most famously in Kishiniv, which is in present-day. Moldova. Programs would come fast and furious and escalate over the next 40 years, reaching a crescendo during the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1921. In the end, six-figure number of Jews would die maybe 200,000 over the course of those 40 years. But the belief that programs were coming for you, that you would end up experiencing them, was a normative belief among Russian Empire Jews.

my great Grandma Dora fled the pogromist mob as it was coming down the street when she was only a little girl with her family in Odessa. And so it was the lived experience of these Jews, and they began to flee in their millions. At first they flee west to the immediate neighbor of Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So many Jews cross the border in flight, in fear, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that the Austro-Hungarian Empire becomes convinced that it's a Russian plot to dump its Jewish problem on then. It causes a diplomatic rift between the Russians and the Austrians, to the point where the

Austrians cancel negotiations for a major loan to the Russian Empire, which it needed to sustain its military forces in between all the many wars it was fighting with the Ottoman, something like four wars in 65 years. The Russian Empire is actually hurt diplomatically by this mass Jewish flight. But of course the Jews don't stop in the Austro-Hungarian empire. In the end, the place that makes most sense, the place that seems most viable, the place where there's the most opportunity, is the United States of America. Three million flee westward, two and a half million of them end up in the United States. And that is the major demographic truth, basic fact of American Jewry, that the vast majority of American Jews are the descendants

of that flight, beginning in 1881, ending when the American doors close with the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and also in actually Eastern Europe, the end of the Russian Civil War. One of the most basic facts about those Jews, and it's a fact articulated beautifully and demonstrated beautifully by historian and rabbi Arthur Hertzberg in his book, The Jews in America, was that they were the poorest Jews of Europe. They were not the middle class. They were not the educated. They were not the lawyers. They were not the doctors. They were not the rabbis. The Jews who land in America are the lower classes, or as he puts it, the masses without the classes. There weren't classes because it was just the destitute desperate bore. And those are the people who make that

moves. And that's really important that the single biggest year of Jewish migration, 1906, 200,000 Jews land in the United States in that one year. It was the biggest year up to that point, and it was the biggest year since. Of 200,000 Jews, only 50, register with immigration. officials as professionals. These are the peasants. These are the village poor. These are not Jewish professionals and Jewish middle classes.

The middle classes, the elites, they stayed in Europe, almost right up to the Holocaust and were in fact destroyed. They always were able to maneuver, to leave, to pick up their assets and move to some other area when oppression loomed, when violence loomed.

And so the Jews who make it into America fleeing the pogroms, fleeing the destitution, fleeing the oppressive laws are the poorest and most desperate. That's a basic truth of the American Jewish experience, the primordial experience that founds the American Jewish community. There's a debate among historians that's vaguely interesting, but just I want to give you my take on it because I think that's more interesting. The debate is we're these fleeing Jews driven mainly by pogroms

as the sort of classic narrative explains, or were they driven by economic need? And it's a debate that's a little bit of a false premise because the answer is, of course, both. The pogroms were a bottom-up popular event. My great grandma was among the many, many Jews who remembered those pogroms as being instigated by the Tsar, by the imperial administration.

It was part of the laws. It was part of the pale of settlement. The reality was much more tragic than that. Historians have demonstrated, I think, incontrovertibly, that the pogroms were something the actual imperial administration of the Russian Empire didn't want, and the police and the officers and the administration of the empire tended to try to suppress in most places. They saw them as chaotic, they saw them as a breakdown of law and order, they saw them as a breakdown of the imperial rule,

and they failed to suppress them. The pogroms were popular. That was the great tragedy of the pogroms. Not that they were the Tsarist anti-Semitic administration, but that the people hated the Jews. The driving forces that pushed the Jews out of Eastern Europe in their millions in the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were not just official anti-Semitism.

And it's important to explain that. It had a lot to do with all of the good things that Tsar Alexander II, the father of the bad czar, was doing industrialization, electrification, the fact that the economies of the rural regions of the southern empire were changing profoundly. Everybody was moving to the cities.

It was no longer economically viable with industrialization to survive off the land in many places. Railroads were connecting these cities in ways that hadn't existed before. Mass societies were being born out of very localized communities, and identities up until that point.

And all of this turmoil that was breaking down traditional family, breaking down traditional identity, breaking down the economic viability of traditional ways of life, all of this turmoil led to tremendous anxiety and upheaval. And that anxiety and upheaval was projected onto the biggest, closest minority available, which was the Jews. The pogroms were popular. They were local people doing,

what they wanted to do. The historian John Clire from the University of Chicago demonstrated that the pogroms actually followed the rail networks. Rail workers would carry a blood libel from one town to the next, would instigate a pogrom in one town, move on to the next town as the train moved on,

and instigate a program there too. It was a function of industrialization and modernization, and it was popular, and it was bottom up. Jews were absolutely driven out by anti-Semitism, and absolutely driven out by poverty, like the Irish immigration to America, like the Italian immigration to America, but also the anti-Semitism, which was unique.

And how do we see this? In his book, Europe against the Jews, the historian Goetz Ali points out that of the many immigrant populations that moved to America during the 19th century, huge numbers went back. In the panic of 1907, the financial collapse of 1907,

over the next 18 years or so from 1908 to 1925, 57% of Italian immigrants return to Italy. 40% of Polish immigrants returned to Poland. 64% of Hungarians, 67% of Romanians, 55% of Russians. Among Jews, it was just 5%. And his explanation is very simple. He quotes Israel Zangnville, the British Jewish author, giving a speech in 1908 in London,

and he's talking about this vast Jewish immigration, which again, the peak year, 200,000 Jews in a single year, landing in America was just two years earlier. And he says, what home does the Jew have to return to? 300,000 Italian immigrants just returned home to Italy in 1908 because of the crash of 1907. Well, what if a Jew did that? What if 300,000 Jews did that?

The Jew was made to flee without a passport. He can't return, Zangville says. In a pamphlet that same year, Eugene Docter, a German writer, an author, he says that the anti-Semitic hatred driving the Jews westward was going to escalate and it was going to turn dark. Jews, he wrote, no longer knew where they should tread or lay their heads. and if a solution wasn't found the situation in the east would come to a boil one fine day doctor wrote even this situation will be swept away and all will have will be the revival of the old refrain the jew must be burned alive it's chilling to think that those words are written in german in nineteen o eight about what the jews are fleeing

Folks, there's the pull factor of America, and there's the push factor of anti-Semitism and oppression, and both drive the Jewish turn to America. Once the Jews land in America, they can't go back, unlike every other immigrant group. And who receives them in America? Here we open a new chapter in the story. We actually take a step back. When the two and a half million fleeing destitute Russian immigrant Jews land in America would come to be. called Russian Jews and sort of American Jewish parlance at the time. They were received by a community barely a tenth the size of the immigration wave, maybe 300,000 German Jews. That was the,

again, way they were talked about at the time. They are immigrants to the United States from Central Europe, German-speaking immigrants, who arrived between 1820 and 1860, most of them in the 1840s and 50s. They've established tremendous numbers of Jewish institutions, but they come in this enormous wave of German immigration that is non-Jewish. There's this vast migration of German-speaking Jews that from 1820 to 1860 take the American Jewish population from about 6,000 to about 150,000. The first huge wave of Jews lands in the United States. And folks like the later wave of Russian Jews, they also come desperately poor. Not quite as desperate, not quite as poor, not quite as chased out as the Russian Jews who would come later.

But they couldn't stay. It was a general policy of villages in Bavaria, 50% of the Jews who arrived arrived from Bavaria, that if a Jew was going to join a village, and I don't mean move to the village, I mean be born to a family living in the village, then another Jew would have to live. leave because the total number of Jews in a village, village law stipulated, had to remain the same. And so huge numbers of young Jews had to leave the villages of Bavaria. And they made their way. They made their way over to the United States in this massive wave. And in the United States, they found opportunity unimaginable in scale, almost in the history of the world. The Jewish migration of

150,000 Jews comes in the middle of a general Irish and German migration of 1.7 million Irish and 1.3 million Germans. So it's a very large migration of which the Jews are a small part. In Jewish terms, it's a huge group of people, but in general immigrant terms, it's not. And the Jews are among the best educated of them, and so the best position to take advantage of a huge explosion in economic activity. The United States, between 1820 and 1860, goes from a country that's only 20% urban and 80% rural and farmers to a country that's about half and half. It's an enormous urbanization process

that creates brand new markets. And so the majority of the Jewish migrants, literally more than half with the Jewish migrants, become wealthy in that period. Marcus Goldman. That's Goldman of Goldman Sachs. Well, he arrives in Philadelphia in 1848 and he's peddling

schmattas, he's peddling used clothes. And within a year he's opened a clothing store. And he uses the money from that clothing store to go into finance. The Lehman Brothers. The Lehman Brothers, uh, land in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844, they're peddling schmattas as well. That's what they know how to do, Henry, Emmanuel, and Meyer Lehman. The next year, 1845, they open a store.

They seem to understand something about price. going up and down and going to cotton brokering. And that's the beginning of Lehman Brothers. And that's the general story of this immigrant wave of Jews. And so 300,000 Jews who are settled, they're already two generations in America, they're well-to-do, they're established, in 1881, begin to absorb into them

what would be 200, two and a half million, almost ten times their number. Two and a half million utterly destitute Jews fleeing an entire civilizational world that was becoming totally uninhabitable to that. The masses without the classes. The peasantry.

And this is an important point. Shalom Alayfim, the great Yiddish writer, that's the pen name of Sholem Rabinvitz, the man who wrote, for example, Tevya the Dairyman, who had become fiddler on the roof. He comes to America. He's very much.

visits in 1906 for the first time. He thinks he might be moving, but he hates it, because American Jews are illiterate. They're uncouth. There's nothing to do there. His last major book, Mottal Paisa, the Cantor's son, is about a young man who comes to America impoverished from Eastern Europe. But he comes from a family of learning. He comes from a family of middle-class values. But Mutil Paisi finds in America a cultural wasteland, a Jewish community without intellectuals, without writers, without thinkers. European rabbis, whether it was in London or it was Hasidic rabbis in Eastern Europe, treated America as a religious wasteland. Rabbis in Britain would not accept the conversions of rabbis in America all the way into the 1920s, because America was a place

where you don't have real rabbis. Hasidic rebis in Eastern Europe talked about America as a land of exile. Eastern Europe, that's the homeland. That's where you have. Joshua of Bells, the Belzer Rebbe. He died in 1894. He was asked to come to America.

To help minister to the Jews living there, he said the world is full of evil spirits. Generations of piety in Europe had purified Europe of those evil spirits, but there were no pious, Sidim in America. And so America was a world still full of evil spirits. That's how he talked about America. This gap, this peasant population, this poverty-stricken lowest class of Jews who

move in their millions and are absorbed into a community that is wealthy. Those German Jews are wealthy, but culturally they're not different. In the 1850s, they're arriving, the 1840s they're that class from Central Europe. The Great Great. rabbis and great thinkers and great intellectuals, some arrive, some arrive and their names become famous, but most do not. And so America is born, because it's born from the lowest class, American Jewish community, from the lowest class of Jew in Europe, the least educated, the least literate, is born as a community without tremendous Jewish learning at institutions of cultural creation. And one of the first things that American Jews do at every turn, literally from day one, is take care of each other. And that brings us into the story of the creation of the unbelievable institutions, unparalleled institutions. No other community, no other subgroup, no other part of America, a minority in America, has anything remotely like it.

of the American Jewish institutional life, of the federations, of the tremendous numbers of advocacy groups and charities, it's actually unique. In every major city that absorbs in which a small community of well-to-do German Jews absorbs the desperate, vast numbers of Russian Jews, these communities can no longer afford to maintain their institutions, their charities, their communal institutions, this isn't America long before the welfare state of today. They can no longer afford to do it on an ad hoc basis. The old age home and the

Jewish hospital and the burial society and the school can't all afford to each have their own fundraiser who goes around and depending on the specific charisma of each specific person, that's the budget of that institution for that year. There's just not enough money. Every dollar matters. Then you get the first proper federation, and that's established in 1895 in Boston, and it's all the Jewish charities who come together around a single table and say we're going to fundraise together, and we're going to disperse the money together, because not a single dollar can be spared, and so based on need, we're going to give this out. The second federation, that shouldn't be a surprise, is founded in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1896. In Chicago, in 1900, in St. Louis, in Philadelphia,

in Milwaukee, in Cleveland. And so a tremendous amount of the institutional edifice of American Jews. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is born in this period when these German Jews are trying to take care of their Russian Jewish brethren. And a dozen others, in other words, a lot of the advocacy organizations of American Jewry are about what's happening in Eastern Europe. And they're about the Russian Jews driving it home. home in their arrival in the millions. And so there's this founding impulse of American Jews to take

care of their own that creates this culture and this moment when a small but fairly well to do because it landed in a successful moment in a successful place, Jewish community has to now care for a vast and desperate group of destitute Jews. And that creates that American Jewry that has those incredible strengths. And folks, everything I just described is the deepest fundamental drive of American Jewry. The very first Jews in America,

the first 23 souls who land in New Amsterdam in 1654. They come off a boat, a Dutch boat that comes to the Dutch colony of what would come to be called New York 10 years later. they get off the boat, they are refugees, poor and desperate and penniless, coming from Recifi in Brazil of today, when the Portuguese retake, reconquer Recivi from the Dutch,

and the Jews have to flee. The Portuguese and the Spanish are still enforcing the expulsion. They're still enforcing the Inquisition, and the Jews flee, and they can't leave the boat as it travels from port to port, because every board it lands in, the ship that they're fleeing on, is either Portuguese or Spanish. And so the first time they can actually get off the boat is in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. And by that time, the captain has taken all of their money because this trip just keeps extending itself.

They've sold their furniture. They've sold everything they own. The captain is actually the first person off the boat when the gangplank lands and people can now step off the boat in New Amsterdam. And he goes to the court of the colony and he sues the Jews. for their fee, for their passage, because he took all their money, and it wasn't enough to pay

for the length of the passage that he did not expect to be so long. He probably was expecting the Dutch colony itself to pay their way. Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of New Amsterdam, writes to the Dutch West India Company back in Holland. He doesn't want the Jews. And the Dutch West India Company was doing a lot of business with some Jewish financiers. He didn't want to make them angry, so he told them, you've got to take them in. but the Jewish community itself, the Jews, those are 23 Jews, the beginning of that Jewish community, including a couple of families with kids.

They promise the governor and the administration of the colony that they're going to take care of their own, that they're not going to be a burden. The very first Jewish New Yorkers were penniless refugees who had to promise to take care of their own as a condition for being allowed to stay. And that's the story of the German Jews, and that's the story of the German Jews, and that's the, the story of the German Jews absorbing the Russian Jews, and that basic premise of taking care of each other is so fundamental that maybe that constitutes the non-religious portion of what it is to be an American Jew, in identity and culture. American Jews will go to bat for Israel. They'll go to bat for hungry Jews in Ukraine in periods of poverty in Ukraine after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they'll go to bat for Soviet Jews trying to get out of the Soviet Union.

American Jews will organize and they'll mobilize, like almost no other American minority. There have been many, many mass mobilizations and movements in America among many minorities. But the Jews have been extraordinary among them to help other Jews. And you see it again and again and again over 250 years. At some point, you have to say maybe this is the content, the substance. Why? Because they're born as refugees. It is a community born in the experience of destitution and desperation.

And there's one last piece. The Great Rebellion. It isn't just that American Jews are almost to an individual, the descendants of the poorest, least educated, and most desperate of European Jews. It isn't just that they flee waves of violence and oppression. It isn't just that all the elites, the professional elites, the tradesmen, the rabbis, the scholars, all stay behind. It goes deeper.

Because other immigrant communities, the Italians and the Irish, for example, built Catholic churches and brought their priests with them and respected them more in America than they ever respected them back in the old country. And the Jews did not. The Jews did not like their rabbis. When a rabbi landed in Chicago and declared himself chief rabbi and went around to the slaughterhouses and to the butchers and various restaurants of the Jews and tried to impose a unified,

kosheru to kosher certification system? He was run out of town. The Jews of America didn't want the reestablishment of the Jewish elites and communal institutions that had existed in Eastern Europe and resisted it at every turn and hated the rabbis at every turn. Not all of them, not everybody, but most. Why? Why were the Jews uniquely committed to not rebuilding the communities that they had left?

compared to other immigrant groups. It wasn't an accident. It was a function of real pain and real trauma. In 1827, in order to sustain the military deployments that the empire needed, the Russian Empire begins to impose a mandatory draft on minorities. On Poles, on Jews, until 1827, Jews are double-taxed, one taxed, the regular tax, and the second tax in lieu of military service.

And then in 1827, the state, the empire, comes looking for soldiers. For other communities, non-Jewish communities, conscripts were from 18 to 35, and they would be taken to military service, which could be 25 years. But they were adults. Among the Jews, the age limits were dropped down to 12. Jewish community itself, the kahl, the imperially recognized leadership of the Jewish community, was given by the empire the horrific task of choosing the Jewish children who would be sent to essentially what was a Christianization program taken from their families, taught Russian,

the purpose and willful intent of converting them to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and would be sent to 25 years of military service. And so the Jewish communal leadership, the rich Jews, the educated Jews, would employ what were called thoppers, grabbers, who would pick up a Jewish kid on the street of a poor family and just whisk them away, and they would never be seen again by their families. And this was an experience that tens of thousands of Jewish families went through. Jews who land in the United States in the 1880s and 90s have an uncle who disappeared into

the Imperial Military Service and disappeared at the hands of the Jewish elites. It's hard to come to the Jewish elites with complaints. I find it hard. hard because they had to choose their own children or someone else's and they chose someone else's but who was the someone else it was the vulnerable it was the poor it was the ones without political power it was the uneducated it was the ones who didn't know how to fight back that trauma that bitterness that anger that social stratification and imperial policy of setting different jewish classes against each other drove a kind of bitter class consciousness part of the story. Jews who land in America produce poetry in English, in Yiddish, expressing bitter and deeply personal memories about family members who had been whisked away to the Tsarist armies.

It was a rebellion. The forgetting of the old community and rejecting of the old elites was born of a trauma imposed on the Jews by the imperial administration. One of the of the greatest elements of Tsarist oppression, the stealing of actual children from Jewish families on a mass scale over two generations to serve in the Imperial Army. Why don't American Jews know their history? What is the forgetfulness? What is the cultural weakness? Why do American Jews who don't devote a significant part of their life? to swimming in the Jewish bookshelf, to learning Jewish languages, to being capable of dealing with a page of Talmud or a studying Jewish text.

If you're not in that religious world, which is a path that exists in America and the institutions exist and the elites exist, but outside of those elites, what is the Jewishly cultural, distinctly Jewish content of American Jewish life? And the answer is that this is a Jewish community because of its particular traumas that form. it, that created it, that established it, that were the founding primordial experience that shaped it. This was the community that was born rejecting the old Jewishness. They were still Jewish, deeply Jewish.

But the shallowness turned out to be a tremendous advantage in America. I'll give you an example. The Jews land, like the Irish, like the Italians, and established massive organized crime networks. a poverty-stricken new immigrant communities not well policed by existing law enforcement established organized crime the jewish mob for decades was more powerful than the italian and irish mobs in many places and then the jewish mob unlike the italian mob unlike the irish mob evaporated or faster evaporate where did it go one of the most extraordinary conclusions that you draw from taking this deep dive into the cultural roots and historical roots of american jewish life is the realization that american jews begin as the poorest and least educated jews in the world maybe in history

But they have this image in themselves. They have this image that they imagine of what a Jew is. And it's an image that sticks with them from Europe. And it's an assumption, an image, a stereotype, that isn't true about them, but is true about what Jews are. And because they think of Jews as middle-class professional scholars, rabbis, they're embarrassed to carry on. Organized criminal enterprises from generation to generation.

The children of mob bosses go to college and don't join the family business. What's really fascinating about the Jewish story isn't even just on the question of the Jewish mob, which evaporates because of social stigma. What's fascinating is that American Jews to this day are convinced that the extraordinary educational achievements and the extraordinary financial and commercial and cultural achievements of American Jews are a product of then coming from Europe with all these cultural strengths. But they're not. The Jews who had those strengths in Europe, the intellectual elites and cultural elites and writers and thinkers and scholars and physicists,

they didn't come to America. It was just the sense that that's what Jews are. American Jews imagined Jews to be something and then went and became the thing that they imagined the Jews are. If that's not the American promise, if that's not the most extraordinarily American story, I don't know what is. Welcome to a community born of the most impoverished and destitute,

generation after generation after generation for two and a half centuries that took care of its own as its most founding primordial foundational ethos and built the strongest wealthiest most influential safest jewish diaspora's ever been and maybe there are only weakness and the weakness we can start to see now because in some parts of the American ideological and political landscape there's now a war on their story and on their identity maybe their only weakness

is that that story, that history, that experience robbed them of their sense of their history. They forgot where they came from. All of that story shrunk to a cartoon version of fiddler on the roof. It's time for American Jews to remember, to relearn their history, to rediscover their strength. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in episode three.