Chalk Games, by Arthur Leipzig, 1950. Inspired by a Breughel painting of children playing, the Brooklyn-born Jewish photographer Arthur Leipzig set out to photograph children’s games throughout the city. Street games defined growing up in the city for Jewish children, as much a part of their formative experience as living in small apartments. His image of chalk games played by boys on a city street illustrates aspects of an urban working-class childhood characteristic of the lives of children of Jewish immigrants in New York: gendered, unsupervised play on streets designed to accommodate traffic. © Arthur Leipzig. Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery.
7
Raising Two Generations
September 1960. For two days, on Thursday and Friday, the New York City public schools closed their doors to honor the Jewish New Year. This unprecedented recognition of Jewish religious identity marked one kind of arrival of New York Jews. For years, demographers trying to estimate the Jewish population of the city had used “the Yom Kippur method,” which counted the number of absences in public schools on that day, compared them to a “standard” day, and then extrapolated an approximate total population count from the presumed absent Jewish students. Of course, not only Jews took off on Yom Kippur. Especially in schools with largely Jewish student bodies, Christian students often yielded to temptation to enjoy a break from their lessons since not much was done in mostly empty classrooms. But by 1960, although Jewish children made up only a third of the public school students, Jewish teachers constituted 45 percent of the teaching staff, and Jews were a majority among school principals. A mix of pragmatism and politics suggested that closing the public schools would relieve widespread absences at the same time as it gestured to a significant Jewish presence in the city. Thus, the High Holidays joined Christmas in the New York City public school calendar along with combined Easter and Passover vacations.1
Jews’ massive numbers and concentrated distribution throughout the city allowed them “to embrace a vision of the city as a whole,” without losing sight of themselves as a distinct group.2 Raising children in New York, Jewish parents—both immigrant and second generation—sought to find ways to participate in American life even as they maintained a sense of Jewishness. Unlike other large cities, New York offered a free education extending from elementary school through college. Thus, many New York Jews aspired to acquire a college education, even if only a small percentage fulfilled this dream. Jews also observed the city’s religious and ethnic diversity, borrowing ideas and practices from their Catholic neighbors to fashion new ways to be Jewish. While Jews faced ongoing discrimination in opportunities for work, they possessed the possibility of establishing ethnic niches in the city that sustained them during economic crises, like the Great Depression, and provided socioeconomic mobility during periods of prosperity. Out of this mix of promise and prejudice emerged several generations of New York Jews.
Religious Innovations
Rhythms of Jewish living traditionally revolved around weekly Sabbath observance and an annual cycle of holidays punctuated by life-cycle events. Jewish modes of observance informed daily living, especially in food consumption but also in regular morning, afternoon, and evening prayers. Men and women participated differently in these religious patterns, since only men were expected to lay tefillin each day as part of their prayer ritual and to attend worship services on Sabbaths and holidays. Women fulfilled their religious obligations domestically, lighting Sabbath candles and making sure, through their shopping and cooking, that their homes were kosher, fit for their families. Parents shared responsibilities for raising children, teaching them how to read Hebrew and how to pray, along with knowledge of Jewish culture, ethics, and history. But even here gender differences dictated how boys and girls learned to be Jewish.3
New York City—its economic demands, Americanization pressures, and political attitudes—assaulted male normative practices, especially those of public prayer, while allowing for preservation by Jewish immigrants and their children of a new mix of folk, domestic, and elite forms of Judaism. This blend emphasized annual holiday and life-cycle events, especially bar mitzvah and marriage. Simultaneously, capitalist markets, congregational freedoms, and organizational initiatives encouraged innovative forms of urban Judaism. Eventually religious pluralism came to characterize experiences of Jewish lived religion in the city. As with other aspects of New York Jewish culture, religious experiments that took root in the city found adherents among Jews across the United States.
Faithfulness to dietary laws, or kashrut, signaled observance of Jewish traditions. Eastern European Jews created a large market for kosher goods, and many companies, whether owned by Jews or non-Jews, sold kosher products. Food manufacturers targeted Jewish consumers with advertisements explicitly touting their products as kosher. Some companies established by immigrant Jews, such as Gellis, Horowitz-Margareten, Rokeach, and Hebrew National, catered mainly to a kosher market. They added rabbinic seals of approval to their packages testifying to their ritual purity. Even before World War I, national brands such as Quaker Oats, Babbitt’s Cleanser, Borden’s Condensed Milk, Uneeda Biscuits, Proctor & Gamble Crisco shortening, and many items from General Foods and Heinz 57 Varieties carried rabbinic seals as well.4
Yet as it became easier to keep kosher, a contradictory trend developed: fewer Jews chose to maintain kosher homes, though they might adopt stricter standards at holiday times. Consumption of kosher meat in New York City fell even before immigration restriction. Simultaneously, many Jews transferred their previous concerns for ritual purity to sanitary standards in processed foods. Advertisers soon recognized the implicit equation. As early as 1912, Borden’s adopted the slogan “Pure Means Kosher—Kosher Means Pure.” As New York Jews abandoned kashrut, they embraced a modern preference for recognizable brands of packaged goods with reliably predictable quality. Many Jews, however, favored distinctive items, chosen in response to advertising that set their diets apart from non-Jewish New Yorkers. This innovation took kashrut observance away from rabbinic authority and placed it in the hands of individual consumers, who decided what to purchase. “Kosher style,” an alternative to kosher, signaled Jewish partiality for certain flavors, such as pastrami and pickles, and disdain for others, such as cheeseburgers that mixed meat and dairy.5
Food also played a key role as New York Jews elaborated life-cycle events. They especially endowed bar mitzvahs as occasions for celebrations that gradually shifted the focus away from the synagogue toward the catering hall. Relatively modest parties in honor of a thirteen-year-old boy achieving adulthood within the context of Jewish religious practice expanded into expensive events, with formal invitations, music, dancing, and large catered meals. Recognizing a need to provide some ritual for these Saturday-evening parties, Brooklyn Jewish caterers invented a candle-lighting ceremony that improvised on American birthday celebrations. At the high point of the evening, a cake topped with thirteen candles arrived and the bar mitzvah boy called on thirteen adults, usually family members whom he wished to honor, to light a candle. The new ritual caught on and spread beyond the city.6
Bar mitzvahs pulled teenagers and their families into synagogues during one year, but after that year passed, many New York Jews reverted to a practice common already in the nineteenth century of attending services only on the High Holidays. A pre–World War II survey showed that religious social activities—not to mention services—ranked dead last among some fifty leisure-time activities for Jewish teens, males and females, and those in their early twenties. Many enjoyed simply “walking or hanging around.” The neighborhood mattered more than the synagogue.7
Mordecai M. Kaplan, among the most innovative rabbis in New York City, proposed a major change in Jewish religious life when he called up his oldest daughter—he had four of them—to read from the Torah one Sabbath in 1922 when Judith was thirteen. Moved by the recent passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, Kaplan reasoned that girls as well as boys should be initiated into Jewish adulthood through a parallel ritual of bat mitzvah demonstrating their mastery of Hebrew prayers and Torah reading. Judith’s father considered this invention part of his challenge to Judaism’s status quo on many theological and ritual fronts, leading eventually to the rise of Reconstructionist Judaism. But it also reflected, as Judith Kaplan Eisenstein recalled decades later, “a conscious feminism in our household.” The Kaplans were far ahead of their time; bat mitzvah did not become commonplace until after World War II. Although this novelty appalled Kaplan’s Orthodox mother, who warned him that his rabbi father was turning over in his grave, Kaplan persisted in his insistence that Jewish women were equal to Jewish men and that both deserved to participate in public Jewish religious ritual.8
New York Jews also innovated at the end of life. Traditionally, Jews allocated responsibility for burying the dead to a voluntary association, hevre kadisha (holy association), which ritually washed and dressed the body (tahara), prepared the simple pine coffin (when coffins were required for burial), and escorted the body to the cemetery. Men cared for men, and women cared for women. Jews established cemeteries at the city’s edges since Judaism required the dead to be buried beyond residential areas. Often the purchase of land for a cemetery preceded the organization of a congregation in a city. The dead needed a place to rest among Jews; the living could live among non-Jews.
But as New York grew, distances between where Jews lived—and died—increased until Jews had to hire transportation to take their dead for burial. Communal practices that had taken care of interment struggled to keep up with a burgeoning Jewish population. More and more people died in hospitals, necessitating two trips: first to take the corpse home and then to the cemetery. The undertaker, a “species of middleman made necessary by the complexities of the modern city,” gradually superseded the traditional burial society.9
At this point, enterprising Jewish delivery drivers and undertakers realized that they could expand their business if they offered additional services. Jews rejected embalming, which swept the United States as a result of the Civil War. Nor did they care for cremation. But crowded tenement apartments made purifying a corpse difficult, even with the requirement of immediate burial, usually within twenty-four hours. In addition, modern bureaucracy requiring registration of deaths spurred specialization. So the delivery drivers and undertakers teamed up to assume these tasks. They handled the city-mandated details, removed the corpse to a funeral “parlor” that mimicked the room where a family would have placed the dead at home, prepared and clothed the body according to Jewish ritual, and transported it to the cemetery. Soon they tendered additional funeral “services,” including a religious functionary to read psalms and give a eulogy. “By 1910, if not earlier, it was possible to bypass synagogue, hevre kadisha and lodge and go directly to a funeral director who would provide all of the necessary services, arrange for the purchase of a burial plot and secure the ministrations of a rabbi and cantor for the funeral.”10
So popular did these commercialized and privatized funeral practices become that generations of New York Jews accepted them as traditional. Jewish undertakers evolved into funeral directors and established a number of large family chains of funeral homes, similar to those of Christians. Handling Jewish deaths in New York became a big business.11
In new neighborhoods settled by Jews after World War I, Sabbath and kashrut observance devolved largely into matters of personal concern, while religious issues among Jews focused on synagogues, previously the domain of men. Even as eastern European and Sephardic Jews caught up to central European Jews who had made the Bronx and Brooklyn their homes when these boroughs were still remote, outlying districts, cultural divides persisted. Many of the former hesitated to join Reform congregations, preferring to start their own. Religious pluralism soon characterized many New York Jewish neighborhoods, where Orthodox and Conservative synagogues stood across the street from Reform temples.
Mother and Child, by Rebecca Lepkoff, c. 1950. Growing up on the Lower East Side, Rebecca Lepkoff started taking photographs in the 1940s. Her classes at the heavily Jewish New York Photo League encouraged her to develop a point of view. She trained her camera on her own neighborhood world, picturing those quotidian moments that captured relationships among people struggling to make a living. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, most Jewish women left paid employment after children were born. © Rebecca Lepkoff. Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery.
Religious leaders of all Jewish movements bemoaned the empty seats in their sanctuaries on the Sabbath; however, Rabbi Kaplan proffered the most creative solution to Jewish disengagement with congregations. His “synagogue center” idea popularized a strategy that those who came to play might in time be convinced to stay to pray. Kaplan left his first experimental synagogue center, the Jewish Center in Manhattan, to establish the Society for the Advancement of Judaism and a new religious movement. Articulated in his magnum opus, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (1934), Reconstructionism promulgated the concept of Judaism as an evolving civilization. Kaplan urged synagogues to become centers of neighborhood life, for families and not just for men, to exemplify Judaism’s multiple dimensions, especially its cultural expressions. Synagogue centers could embody diverse modes of Jewish worship—in fact, the Jewish Center retained its commitment to modern Orthodoxy—along with gyms and pools in their shuls.12
According to Kaplan’s formula, in the synagogue center, “all the members of the family would feel at home during the seven days of the week.” An ideal synagogue-center building boasted not only a swimming pool and gym, together with spaces for worship both large and small, but also classrooms for religious education, a kosher kitchen and restaurant for elegant dining, a social hall for celebration of bar mitzvahs and weddings, a room for theatrical productions and public lectures, a library, and rooms for conversation and discussion. Such an elaborate, multifaceted building cost money, and many synagogue centers charged hefty dues for membership. Kaplan aimed to build social connections, using the center to make Jews more fully Jewish in all aspects of their lives. Israel Levinthal, a Kaplan disciple and rabbi at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, believed there was “magic” in this methodology. He thought the “magic” would appear when a “young man, entering the gymnasium class, would notice the announcement on the bulletin board that on the next evening a meeting would be held in the interest of Jewish refugees or for relief.” With the young man’s “interest aroused,” he would then come to a weekday Forum lecture. “The chairman would announce that on the coming Friday eve, the rabbi would speak on this or that subject.… He would come to the services. If the services appealed to him, he would come again.”13
Brooklyn Jewish Center, Wurts Brothers, 1924. In new neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn and the Bronx, Jews erected synagogue centers. These impressive buildings combined religious worship with education and recreation. Often called “the shul, with a pool and a school,” a synagogue center catered to the entire family rather than just to male worshipers, as had characterized many immigrant congregations. It also appealed specifically to local neighborhood residents, rather than to European hometown associations. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
Although a string of interwar synagogue centers in New York adopted this approach, they failed to inculcate regular attendance at religious services in many members. Those who placed worship at the heart of Judaism questioned whether athletes or artists would ever find their way from the synagogue’s gym, classrooms, or auditorium to its sanctuary. During the Great Depression, many people with time on their hands turned to synagogue centers as secular Jewish retreats. Singers such as Sophie Tucker or Belle Baker performing at a congregational benefit packed the house and contributed toward filling strapped coffers. But such events that “blurred the boundaries between the world of Broadway and the world of the synagogue” did little to increase regular worship participation. In the Bronx, four thousand Jews may have attended High Holiday services at one synagogue center, not to mention those who, as always, congregated outside, but during the year, half-empty sanctuaries predominated.14
After World War II, synagogue centers acquired a new appeal as a means of inculcating Jewish identity in children. Neighborhood religious culture of Jewish Queens, described as a “midway point” between “the Big City and suburbia,” did not initially radiate Jewishness. For many families from Brooklyn and the Bronx, their move to Queens “involved a new adventure in Jewishness, expressing itself in formal affiliation, for the first time in their lives, with a Jewish community institution.” These Jews lived in a tolerant environment, where they watched a strengthening of social ties between their children and Christian friends that filled them with anxiety. Some parents trusted a Jewish center to entertain their children. They hoped that rather than congregating with a mixed crowd “at the neighborhood movies or ice-cream parlor, hanging out on the corner or even in the basement playrooms of one another’s homes,” Jewish boys and girls would gravitate to a center.15
The Forest Hills Jewish Center started when Jews, a small minority, kept a low social profile, but it enjoyed a heyday after World War II, when the neighborhood became distinctively Jewish. Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser expanded the center to include a commodious sanctuary, an auditorium for social activities, and a youth center. Some thirty social clubs and basketball, swimming, and boxing leagues attracted almost seven hundred children to its Hebrew school, with many bar and bat mitzvahs every week. The synagogue center thus adopted activities once associated with settlement houses and YMHAs. Only now parents, rather than Jewish philanthropists, paid for these.16
Orthodox Jews increasingly addressed identity issues less through their synagogues, which remained the domain of men, than through an emphasis on modern parochial schools. These differed from the yeshivas of the interwar period. Adopting the neutral term “day school,” this movement moved beyond its core constituency of parents committed to traditional religious observance with the opening of the Ramaz School in Manhattan in 1937. Concerted efforts recruited children from families that were less committed to Orthodox Judaism. Ramaz convinced them of the value of parochial education.17
Such an effort appeared in Queens as well. Samuel Spar recruited six youngsters from observant families, starting with his son, to a fledgling school that offered a modern religious Zionist orientation. When it acquired its own building, it had seven grade levels. Initially, it relied on enrollment of children of Orthodox refugees from Hitlerism or survivors of the Holocaust who had settled in Queens. Soon pupils from “non-Orthodox” homes throughout the borough joined them.18
But religious heterogeneity stimulated tensions within the Yeshiva of Central Queens. The school day opened with recitation of morning prayers from the siddur (the Orthodox prayer book), grace accompanied meals, and boys wore yarmulkes and tzitzit (the fringed undergarment worn by Orthodox Jews). However, Conservative families objected strenuously when the school administration “introduced segregation of the sexes … not only in the class room, but also in the dining room and playground.” Gender segregation in school, as in synagogue, proved to be a critical line dividing Orthodox from other modern forms of Judaism. Ultimately, those who “desire[d] a more liberal approach to Jewish education” determined that they had to have a school of their own. So they established the Solomon Schechter Day School of Queens. Subsequently Conservative day schools all over the country turned to this New York Jewish educational initiative as a model.19
Many Holocaust survivors gravitated to New York and made up a large proportion of roughly 130,000 German and Austrian Jews in the city. Anti-Semitism of a different sort propelled thousands of Sephardic Jews to America and especially to New York in the postwar decades. Driven by Arab anger over the rise and military successes of the State of Israel, popular animosities and governmental policies forced Jews from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt to flee. Special congressional legislation passed in 1957 to help “victims of persecution,” designed to assist Hungarian refugees from communism, also eased the way for Egyptian Jews to enter the United States.20
These Jewish newcomers, like so many immigrants before them, searched for familiar faces, essentially those men and women who shared their ethnic, social, and religious sensibilities. Orthodox Jews from eastern Europe gravitated to Brooklyn neighborhoods. The co-ops of the Bronx welcomed those who espoused socialist traditions. German-speaking Jews reconnected with refugee establishments in Washington Heights, while others settled on the West Side of Manhattan and in Queens. Sephardim moved into Brooklyn enclaves in Bensonhurst. Most noticeable of these newcomers, varying sects of Hasidic Jews established themselves in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they intensified the neighborhood’s Orthodox Judaism.21
These pious Jews, following their rabbis’ commands, not only “established their own new religious and communal centers” but also “changed the appearance of the neighborhood by” maintaining European habits and customs. Disdaining secular amusements, they converted local movie theaters into yeshivas. The streets filled daily with “men with long beards, kaftans, and all varieties, types and sizes of black hats, and women with wigs or kerchiefs and dark stockings.” To the uninitiated, all of these Hasidim looked pretty much alike. But while Satmarer from Hungary were the largest new group in Williamsburg, the neighborhood housed more than a dozen sects from different parts of eastern Europe, each eager to preserve its own distinctive behaviors. Propinquity heightened another European tradition: disputes and rivalries among different Hasidic groups, each loyal to its own religious leaders’ ideologies and practices. The leaven for controversy rose out of the city’s ecology. Members of Hasidic courts, whether from Klausenberg or Belz or Munkacz or Vizhnitz, “that had once sprawled from Bratislava to Odessa,” now nestled cheek by jowl and of necessity shared the sidewalks.22
By changing the neighborhood’s character, survivors and refugees hastened the relocation of many erstwhile Jewish residents of Williamsburg to other parts of the city and suburbia. While they might have looked back with some disdain at an enclave referred to derogatorily as “refugeetown,” their exodus opened up the area to even more Hasidim, who filled newly vacant apartments. A different Williamsburg resulted. After Hasidim from Williamsburg settled en masse in Borough Park in the 1960s, less pious American Jews relocated again.23
Crown Heights also become a Hasidic hub, home to the Lubavitchers, whose influence on Jewish life extended well beyond their neighborhood. Here, too, a transfer of Jewish populations occurred. While Lubavitchers followed their leader to the neighborhood, they still shared the streets with middle-class American Jews and other ethnic groups. As the Lubavitcher presence expanded, Crown Heights attracted Jewish visitors. Both the faithful and curious came to hear and see the popular rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. His weekly Sabbath public lectures inspired his followers. Thousands crammed into the headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway to listen. Eventually the world became his neighborhood as he broadcast his discourses, first on radio and then on television and video.24
Girl Learning to Skate, by N. Jay Jaffee, c. 1950. After serving in World War II, N. Jay Jaffee returned to his hometown of New York and started to photograph the city. He often pictured familiar working-class Brooklyn Jewish neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York. Roller-skating was both a popular pastime for boys and girls and a fast means of getting around the neighborhood. Skates were strapped to shoes, and their clamps were tightened with a key; sidewalks provided ideal surfaces for speed. © N. Jay Jaffee. All rights reserved. Used by permission of The N. Jay Jaffee Trust, www.njayjaffee.com.
Hasidim returned a visible Jewish religious presence to New York City. As the Lower East Side had advertised its religious Jewishness through signs for kosher butchers, matzo factories, and religious bookstores, Brooklyn’s Hasidic neighborhoods refocused Jewishness on men and women walking the streets in their distinctive garb. These neighborhoods, even more than the Lower East Side, shut down on the Sabbath as well as Jewish holidays. They also reinvigorated public displays of Yiddish. Although they appeared to be in the city but not of the city, Hasidic Jews played an increasingly significant role in New York politics. Their growing numbers helped to distinguish New York Jews from Jews in other American cities. Their most significant innovation came from the Lubavitcher rebbe. Motivated by John F. Kennedy’s call for a Peace Corps, Schneerson adapted the president’s notion of service—in this case, to all Jews but especially unaffiliated ones—to recruit an army of emissaries spreading the possibility of doing a single mitzvah (commandment) on the streets of New York. From New York, these emissaries fanned out into the rest of the world, seeking to transform and redeem Jews, to bring them back to Jewish religious practice. For Lubavitch Hasidim, Brooklyn, not New York (and certainly not Israel), became the center of the Jewish world.25
Higher Education
As more second-generation New York Jews graduated high school, many of them aspired to attend the city’s colleges and universities, particularly its free, municipal-run institutions. A combination of prejudice and penuriousness brought most to local schools of higher education. There they made enduring friendships as they imbibed the intellectual excitement and political ferment that pervaded undergraduate life.
Informal and formal quota systems severely limited the numbers of Jews who attended the nation’s elite private universities, especially from New York. Even if students changed their name on their application and fibbed in answering other personal information questions, a Brooklyn address, their parents’ names and places of birth, a photograph that revealed to prejudiced admissions officers “semitic features,” and a public school transcript announced that they were Jewish. Discrimination reduced the percentage of Jewish students at Columbia, New York City’s only Ivy League school, from 40 percent in the early 1920s to 22 percent ten years later.26
Less prominent schools accepted Jewish students. Land-grant universities opened their doors. But it took both an adventurous, self-confident, and perhaps most importantly, sufficiently affluent young man or woman to seek these distant frontiers of learning. When New York Jews did arrive on these campuses and walk up to Jewish fraternities or sororities in search of friends, they discovered that Jews from other parts of the country rarely welcomed them. Other American Jews considered New Yorkers “undesirable.” They were “loud, unrestrained, poor (or ‘new rich’), lower-class, un-American … and either too traditionally religious or politically radical” to fit in.27
New York University, less prestigious than Columbia, tendered a mixed reception to Jews. Actually, NYU represented “the most striking dualism, a house divided against itself, to be found in the academic world.” The school possessed a bucolic Bronx campus, founded before the borough became so Jewish, “as a men’s country college, with the good old American collegiate spirit.” However, the so-called old guard at NYU considered their “quiet, retired hill-top” world changed and undermined when “aliens,” many of them Jews, began to attend. Anxious to restore the school’s presumed racial-religious balance, school officials instituted “personal and psychological” tests to weed out Jews. They succeeded.28
The “other” NYU, particularly its undergraduate Colleges of Commerce and Education and its Washington Square College in Greenwich Village, where the school began back in the 1830s, extended a more hospitable welcome to Jewish men and women. In the 1920s, James Buell Munn, dean of the liberal arts college, Washington Square, spoke warmly of a mission to provide children of immigrants of both genders with “natural cultural opportunities” within his school. He wanted it to be a “laboratory” for inculcating American values while students strived to fashion productive careers. New York Jews responded by enrolling downtown in all three available branches. Whether or not Jewish undergraduates related to Munn’s assimilatory message, they understood that they were welcome downtown. Munn facilitated a process of molding “an ethnically-diverse, cosmopolitan, largely urban intelligentsia” not only with his vision but also with money he inherited. Jews quickly constituted a majority of students at Washington Square College, many of them commuting each day back home.29
But most college-bound male Jews applied to New York’s own competitive municipal colleges, especially City College of New York (CCNY), “the Cheder [Jewish school] on the Hill,” in upper Manhattan. City College was their “Proletarian Harvard,” where in the 1930s, close to 90 percent of the student body was Jewish. Those who got in understood what it meant to be beneficiaries of their school’s century-old tradition of free tuition. The future New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal recalled of his time as a high school senior, “I had absolutely no conversations with any of my classmates or with my parents about what college I would enter or try to enter.” For Rosenthal, “there was only one choice. You either got into City College or you looked for a job in the Post Office.” At no other college in America did the total daily cost of attendance reach “about 30 cents,… 10 cents for the round trip subway ride and about 20 cents for food.”30
CCNY remained open and free largely due to the efforts of a galvanized student body. In 1932, during the Great Depression, students protested the city’s attempt to “save $1,500,000 at the expense of the City College students.” In an impassioned plea, they argued that the “establishment of fees would seriously cripple” the school’s “enviable reputation” for “intellectual vigor,” transforming a college renowned for its students’ “mental ability” and bringing it “a step nearer to some of our country club establishments.”31
The best CCNY students more than rewarded their alma mater for its uninterrupted largesse. A year after the tuition threat passed, three young men from poor Jewish families, who subsequently won Nobel Prizes in the sciences, enrolled. They were among seven CCNY men who were so honored for scientific research during the generation that spanned the Depression and the early postwar years. But perhaps Jonas Salk best epitomized how New York City, through its distinctive educational promise to its residents, benefited the nation and the world.32
The dark-haired research physician with thick eyebrows who ended the scourge of polio for millions entered CCNY at age sixteen. Salk started college aspiring to be an attorney. But poor grades and pressure from his mother moved him to the premed program, where he excelled. He focused intently on “class work, preparation and exams.… He joined no clubs, held no offices, won no honors, played no sports,” and unlike most CCNY fellows, “made no life long friends.” But upon graduation in 1933 at age nineteen, he had prepared for medical school.33
Salk, brilliant and lucky, gained admission to NYU’s School of Medicine, where “tuition was comparatively low; better still, it did not discriminate against Jews.” He then secured a coveted internship at Mount Sinai Hospital. But anti-Semitism almost denied him more advanced research opportunities. After Rockefeller University turned him down, a non-Jewish former mentor secured him a position at the University of Michigan. In order for Thomas Francis to get his disciple the opportunity, he had to refute the notion that Jews did not get along with people. From 1942 to 1947, Salk worked under Francis. Then he left for the University of Pittsburgh to direct its new viral-research program. Eight years later, he won international acclaim as “the man who saved children.”34
The serious tenor that students like Salk brought to CCNY resembled that of most classmates intent on graduating, desiring to secure decent employment during the difficult Depression years. Living at home and commuting to school, they rushed back to part-time jobs. Without dormitories, CCNY fostered a different collegiate reality.35
Jewish women at Hunter College similarly found college life transitory. As at CCNY before World War II, Jews made up 80–90 percent of the student body. These undergraduates spent “more than half as much time in their underground campus—the subways”—as they did in classes, lectures, and laboratories. During such journeys, female students at Hunter and at Brooklyn College, which opened as a coed institution in 1930, perfected “the art of studying while straphanging.” Yet undergraduates knew that they were a privileged minority. In many families, young women sacrificed their chances at higher education to give their brothers the opportunity to work only part-time while attending college. Jewish women contented themselves with jobs as bookkeepers, in sales, or as secretaries. Jewish male high school graduates were twice as likely as females to continue their education. Jewish men attended graduate and professional schools at a ten-to-one ratio to Jewish women.36
Liberal learning at CCNY offered unrivaled opportunities for a political education. Gathered in alcoves of the school’s cafeteria, doctrinaire advocates of socialism and communism competed to convince others of the rightness of their cause. CCNY’s indoor Jewish street possessed many kiosks, each manned by ideologists who engaged in legendary debates with Jewish spokesmen for different brands of radicalism, positioned provocatively in the next alcove. Alcove 1 contained a mix of “right-wing Socialists … to splinters from the Trotskyist left wing” to an even more “bewildering” array of “Austro-Marxists, orthodox Communists, Socialist centrists,” not to mention “all kinds of sympathizers, fellow travelers, and indeterminist.” When these peripatetic debaters were not battling among themselves, starting out with a civil call—“let’s discuss the situation”—they engaged in intellectual combat with the people in Alcove 2, the home of the pro-Stalinist Young Communist League, headed by Julius Rosenberg.37
These advocates shaped campus culture. They attracted students to the alcoves to listen to arguments. “When that happened,” one veteran of these battles has recalled, “a crowd gathered around the contestants, the way kids do, waiting for a fight to explode. But there were no fist fights, even when the provocations seemed unbearable.” However, once the noise and excitement died down, listeners who did not share the depth of the alcove spokesmen’s concerns drifted away to their worldly pursuits, classes, or part-time jobs. On the one hand, Irving Kristol, a youthful radical at CCNY who became an articulate neoconservative thinker, noted, “because of the kinds of kids that went there,” from working-class Jewish backgrounds, possessed of some degree of radicalism in their families’ traditions, “the entire student body was to one degree or another political.” On the other hand, “most were passive politically, [and] the active types numbered in the hundreds.” This endemic passivity frustrated radicals seeking to take their fights out of the alcoves and into the streets beyond CCNY.38
Antiwar rally at the City College of New York, c. 1938. New York’s free municipal colleges, especially City College for men and Hunter College for women, attracted large numbers of Jewish students, who set a tone of political activism and academic striving. For many New York Jews, City College was their “Proletarian Harvard,” where close to 90 percent of the student body was Jewish in the 1930s. Courtesy of Archives, City College of New York, CUNY.
Women radicals at Hunter College similarly endured disappointment with their rank and file’s unwillingness to commit to their causes. The most dedicated members of the college’s Young Communist League endeavored to do it all. They traveled long distances from home, held part-time jobs, distributed party literature, solicited names on petitions, sold the Daily Worker on Manhattan street corners, and attended interminable political meetings on campus even as they made sure not to miss classes. Notwithstanding their activism, they, too, sought to earn credits for a teaching degree. Most other Hunter students, including many who agreed with activists’ feelings about changing society, neither could nor would juggle home, job, social, and educational demands. Some feared that if word got out that they were troublemakers, they might lose their part-time jobs. Aspiring teachers understood that if the city Board of Education’s Board of Examiners designated them as a “potential threat to the school system,” they would be denied a coveted teaching license. Challenged and conflicted, most Hunter students lingered on the sidelines.39
The socialist Hal Draper, who first spoke out at Brooklyn College and remained with radical movements long enough to link up with New Left operatives in the 1960s, looked back at his and his comrades’ efforts to create ideological strongholds in New York City colleges in the 1930s and estimated that only 1 percent joined the student groups. But their impact extended to “concentric rings of influence embracing different portions of the student body” around them. Some supported particular campaigns when issues touched home. Radical organizations found their widest and staunchest support at CCNY, Hunter, and Brooklyn in 1932, when they championed the students’ ultimate gut issue: the crusade to maintain free tuition. Draper also argued that even those who never attended meetings and focused on their books and jobs “could not help absorbing the climate of ideas which pervaded the political life of the campus as a part of the larger society.”40
Some students actively opposed leftists on campus.41 The most aggressive opponents enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Like all organizations at the school, ROTC consisted predominantly of Jews.42 These students opted to take two basic courses in military science as part of their college curriculum and upon graduation earn a commission in the United States Army. The corps also had its extracurricular component, including a band, a monthly, the Lavender Cadet (a reference to CCNY school colors), and a rifle team. It regularly conducted review parades through campus. Some students signed up because grading was apparently higher in military-science courses than in hygiene, while others joined on the eve of World War II in anticipation of U.S. involvement. But numbers enlisted because they agreed with the administration’s social and political values. In the 1930s, CCNY, the renowned radical campus, had “the largest voluntary unit in the nation.”43
After World War II, the percentage of Jewish students at CCNY gradually declined as opportunities for a college education in New York expanded to include additional four-year colleges as well as two-year community colleges and a graduate school. Many Jewish students understood a college education as a means of socioeconomic mobility. Getting into CCNY required a high grade point average that excluded most high school graduates. In 1970, in response to African American protests and political pressure, the City University of New York decided to guarantee all high school graduates an opportunity to enroll in college. This “open admissions” policy enormously increased the numbers of students on CCNY’s campus, straining its resources. But by this time, many middle-class Jews chose to attend schools away from home. They matriculated either in the moderately priced, growing state university system or in private institutions that had once discriminated against Jews. NYU was still the city’s second-largest Jewish school, with its sixteen thousand students uptown and downtown (40 percent of the student body). Columbia enrolled some sixty-five hundred Jews, 25 percent of its student body.44
New York’s widening web of higher education—all of the boroughs acquired four-year free colleges as part of an expanded City University of New York—provided Jews with a ladder of opportunity unavailable elsewhere. Increasingly, New York Jews assumed that they could obtain a college education if they had the grades and worked hard enough. As attending college became routine for women as well as men in the post–World War II era, Jews shifted their occupational patterns and sought employment in those middle-class positions that required knowledge skills. Their rising educational status and investment in securing cultural capital prepared the children and grandchildren of immigrants for a changing city economy.
Occupational Niches
Immigrant Jews arrived in a city with a diversified and expanding economy encompassing manufacturing, commerce, transportation, construction, and finance. They quickly entered that world mostly as workers, finding employment through family and friends in industries dependent on the relative success of Jewish entrepreneurship. These patterns produced economic niches, with Jews working at all levels of an industry. Jews dominated the garment industry, one of the city’s top sources of wealth and jobs, but they also concentrated in construction, printing, metal and machinery, baking and kosher meat, cigars and cigarettes. New York’s industries, like its commerce, often consisted of relatively small units clustered throughout the city but most prominently in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Such economic structures encouraged entrepreneurship, spreading opportunities to rise into the middle class and distributing New York Jews along a broad socioeconomic spectrum. Indeed, most immigrants, after fifteen years of living in the city, earned as much as native-born workers did. Capitalism tempted Jews to try to change their position from worker to boss, and mobility characterized immigrant occupations. While many failed, those who succeeded recognized the fluidity of their class position, especially since the Great Depression dramatically reduced the livelihoods of all New Yorkers. New York Jews moved up and down the economic ladder, but gradually, immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren, the second and third generation, steadily enjoyed increased prosperity and security.
“Economic insularity, the availability of internal mobility ladders, the advantageous location of Jews in an industry that was rapidly growing for which they brought relevant skills, and the unusual overlap of segregated workplaces and homes” produced a “great paradox.” This long “initial stage of segmented economic incubation” turned out to give Jews an exceptional platform for achievement. Jews faced discrimination in a host of occupations, most of them in large industries such as utilities, insurance, or telephone companies. Fortune magazine assured its readers in the midst of the Depression that Jews “very definitely” did not run banking. Nor did they work in large insurance companies, and they played a limited role in the stock exchange. Except as taxi drivers, most New York Jews did not work in transportation. Not until Mayor Fiorello La Guardia opened up civil service positions to merit-based examinations could they aspire to work in the city’s many bureaucracies. La Guardia’s merit-based appointment system benefited Jews in their battles for city jobs against the Irish, who often lacked academic credentials. Many New York Jews sought the security that a civil service job offered. But with Depression cutbacks, neither a high school diploma nor a college degree guaranteed employment. These exclusions forced Jews to rely on each other for employment and to employ themselves in their own small retail and commercial establishments. As Jews organized unions not just in the clothing industry but also of retail clerks, teachers, social workers, and pharmacists, they often confronted other Jews with demands for decent pay and working conditions. Jews thus continued a tradition of radicalization and support for socialism and communism into the 1930s.45
Second-generation Jews replicated many patterns of behavior of their immigrant parents. Although many of the second generation attained much higher education levels and even attended college, they reconcentrated in new economic niches. So many Jews entered such fields as law, medicine, accounting, and public school teaching that cultural stereotypes appeared. “My daughter, the teacher” took her place next to “my son, the doctor” in the proud litany of a stereotyped Jewish mother. Yet as with industrial and commercial employment, Jewish lawyers worked in Jewish law firms, not the leading “white shoe” corporate firms; Jewish hospitals admitted Jewish doctors, though many remained general practitioners. Even professional degrees did not promise prosperity. Those who broke through difficult barriers to become physicians and dentists did not get lucrative positions. Often professional practitioners relied on an informal network, as Jews turned to other Jews as clients, patients, and customers.46
But the enormous expansion of a public hospital system in New York City along with extension of mandated public education to four years of high school greatly enhanced Jewish occupational opportunities. For decades, Jews made up substantial percentages of new teachers entering the city’s public school system; its enlargement created avenues of internal mobility for men and women to become principals. This career, popular among Jewish women and men, also connected Jews with other Jews in the city despite competition. Many of the brightest Jewish college graduates turned to secondary school teaching. However, growth of the City University of New York promised the most intellectually accomplished a chance to teach at the university level if they successfully pursued advanced study. Anti-Semitic policies that had excluded Jews from university employment retreated after the Second World War under the impact of the GI Bill and intensive Jewish efforts to challenge discrimination through legislation.47
This dynamic interplay of opportunity and promise, combined with exclusion and concentration, spurred Jewish economic innovation. Embracing canonical traditions associated with English and American literatures, New York Jews dove into the business of culture. They entered not just mass entertainment industries such as radio and television but also high-cultural industries like publishing, as well as those located midway between the popular and elite, such as theater and journalism. Leading second-generation Jews of central European background shifted from money making to culture making, sensing opportunities to earn a livelihood in these expanding fields. While eastern European Jewish immigrants enjoyed reading some of the great European writers in Yiddish translations, their children, educated in public schools that taught Shakespeare and George Eliot, absorbed English literature even as some of them recognized its specifically Christian bias. So inspired, a number desired to become cultural authorities themselves.
“Precisely because they were discouraged from pursuing careers in English departments, blackballed from genteel publishing firms, and excluded from meetings of the most prestigious publishers and advertisers,” New York Jews “had to create alternative mechanisms of cultural expression and dissemination.” Thus, they entered high-culture industries as “a subversive force” and changed the nature of the literary field. Beginning with Alfred Knopf, who left Doubleday to found his own firm with his wife, Blanche, Jews upended the city’s publishing industry. A number apprenticed with Knopf and then went on to start their own firms: Horace Liveright of Boni and Liveright, Richard Simon and Max Schuster of Simon and Schuster, George Oppenheimer of Viking Press. Ultimately Bennett Cerf of Random House swallowed up Modern Library and Knopf itself.48
Blanche and Alfred Knopf. Although the publishing house bore Alfred Knopf’s name, Blanche Knopf played a key role in its success. The center of publishing as well as printing shifted to New York City in the twentieth century as Jewish editors, writers, and publishers introduced new types of books (such as paperbacks), innovative modes of marketing (such as Book of the Month Club), and translations of European authors. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
These Jewish publishers transformed the industry and successfully competed with Boston firms, making New York City the center of trade-book publishing in the United States. They provided sustenance for New York Jewish writers, bohemians, and radicals to earn a paycheck and especially gave professional Jewish women a place to work. They not only published translations of European writers, risked publishing writers who challenged obscenity laws, and brought new authors to a burgeoning American middle class, but they also created new markets and ways to reach them through innovative advertising, inexpensive paperback books, and fresh marketing and distribution techniques (e.g., selling books in train stations). In short, they revolutionized the industry and “the very texture of American culture itself.” And in patterns familiar to New York Jews, many of these editors, writers, publishers, and other white-collar workers in the industry chose to live near each other, either uptown on the West Side of Manhattan or downtown in Greenwich Village.49
Jewish entrepreneurs cultivated a willingness among their fellow New York Jews to pay for culture. One leading sociologist emphasized that “large symphony orchestras, the theatres, trade-book publishing, the avant-garde magazines, the market for drawings and paintings, all have as their principal audience and consumer, the Jewish middle-class.” Middle-class Jews running small businesses generated enough money to sustain a vibrant culture scene in the city because they possessed disposable income that they were ready to spend on books, art, theater, and music, rather than on suburban houses, fancy cars, boats, and expensive sports. Thus, “the entrepreneurial wealth of small-unit firms” fueled diverse cultural activities in the city, both popular and elite.50
As most Jewish workers left the garment industry when ready to enjoy Social Security benefits and union pensions, smaller numbers continued as manufacturers and designers. The latter group introduced Jewish fashion ideas to American culture. Not since Levi Strauss developed blue jeans or Ida Cohen Rosenthal, Enid Bisset, and William Rosenthal created the Maidenform bra had Jews helped to shape clothing design for so many Americans. The “enterprising garment industry” carried a Jewish stamp even if fewer Jews actually produced clothing on Seventh Avenue, the new location where garment factories had migrated. Jews continued to sell clothing, through diverse venues ranging from Fifth Avenue and Brooklyn department stores to Fifty-Seventh Street specialty shops to cut-rate operations on Manhattan’s Union Square and Fordham Road in the Bronx. The clothing industry remained relatively easy to enter as an entrepreneur. Surviving required similar techniques of cost cutting employed by Jewish manufacturers in the years of mass immigration, even if unionization had helped to reduce sweatshop conditions.51
Both Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, who attended the same Bronx elementary school, dreamed of becoming wealthy through the garment industry. Lauren (né Lifshitz), while still a high school student, already tried to dress like a fashion designer. He haunted Paul Stuart and Brooks Brothers, among the most upscale haberdashery stores in the city, sampling suits, jackets, ties, and other accessories. Finding the styles wanting, he began to sketch his own clothing lines. At age twenty, he dropped out of CCNY to pursue his ambition, catching on initially as a salesman at Brooks Brothers. Though it took several years before Lauren earned his first million, he was heading up and away from his Bronx origins.52
Unlike Lauren, Klein wanted to design women’s clothing like his role model, his maternal grandmother, a seamstress. Predictably, his unconventional occupational desires did not play well among neighborhood boys. A handsome man with thick, spikey hair, a wide mouth, and broad brow, Klein possessed effeminate mannerisms, though his homosexuality was fully closeted, a common life-style choice for gay men in those years. Klein left his local neighborhood behind when he enrolled in the High School of Industrial Arts in Manhattan and subsequently matriculated at the Fashion Institute of Technology. His courses helped him develop a more sophisticated appreciation of styles, fabrics, and colors.
Upon graduation, Klein hooked up with one of the top “cloak and suit houses.” Dissatisfied, he moved on to a more prestigious firm, where he met a pattern maker, Abe Morenstein. They joined forces. But neither had sufficient capital to fulfill their dreams. So Klein returned to the Bronx and turned to a Jewish boyhood friend, a supermarket owner who had given him part-time work. With Barry Schwartz’s money, Morenstein and Klein established an unofficial partnership. In return for the financial backing, Schwartz requested a large piece of the enterprise. In 1967, Calvin Klein incorporated Calvin Klein Ltd. with Schwartz as a 50 percent “silent partner.” Klein cut Morenstein out, a move not unprecedented in the highly competitive world of Seventh Avenue. Less than a year later, Schwartz became far more than a disengaged investor. When his Sundial Supermarket in Harlem was ransacked in riots following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Schwartz shifted his energies to the Jewish clothing industry. Ten years later, both men were drawing salaries in excess of $4 million.53
The stellar success of Klein and Lauren spoke not only to their talent in designing clothing and mastering the arts of promotion and production central to the industry but also to the enduring, if decreasing, power of ethnic niches to propel New York Jews to take advantage of the city’s changing economy. Most second- and third-generation Jews did not follow their fathers into family businesses, whether those firms manufactured music or machines, but struck out in new areas opened up by declining anti-Semitic exclusion and a changing urban economy. New York reached its peak as the nation’s premier manufacturing center during the 1940s, while retaining its prominence as the country’s financial center and a major commercial city. After the war, this diversified economy shifted. Manufacturing left for southern towns and eventually moved overseas, in part driven out by bankers and developers who coveted factories’ land for more “valuable” uses, in part enticed by cheap labor, and in part made obsolete by new technologies (e.g., in printing). As Jews saw some of their ethnic niches disappear, they responded by creating new ones and by gradually integrating into white middle- and upper-class positions in a city increasingly divided by the conjunction of race and class.54