The Columbia History of Jews and Judaism in America

American Jewish historical writing includes many carefully researched studies of communities in specific cities. But Jewish communities may also acquire a social status, and political legacy, and their cohesiveness may be augmented because of their regional location. Regionalism has provided a major theme for describing the affects of geography and environmental influences on economic and political rivalries in nineteenth-century America. It has also been properly criticized because of the often vague definitions of region and because of the similarities that marked America’s people as they migrated to bring newly settled territory into a national market economy.¹ For the concept of regionalism to hold broad interpretative power, it should explain how an economic base, social networks, and institutions tied communities to one another, how the iconography of region gave these communities a distinctive self-image, and how that image influenced behavior over time.

A growing literature on Jewish communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century South, for example, illustrates how small town Jews, who were supplied from commercial cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, or Galveston, followed life patterns and created institutions different from those created by the Jews of New York, the nation’s main port of entry and population center.² But as Mark Bauman quite correctly notes, southern social patterns seem to have differed little from those of Jews settling in commercial centers almost anywhere in America beyond the industrial Northeast.³ Nevertheless, Jews entered America’s various regions at different moments in the history of each, found themselves at varying distances from the influence of major population centers, encountered different ethnic and racial mixes and different political circumstances, and absorbed different regional lore. Jews constructing similar commercial roles and similar religious and philanthropic institutions in different regions could conceivably have developed a different sense of who they were becoming—as Americans and as Jews—in part because of their neighbors and because of their own relative prominence in defining regional political priorities.⁴ Along the Pacific Coast, Jewish newcomers understood that they were traveling through vast landscapes far removed from the rest of the nation and facing unprecedented civic challenges as regional pioneers. As Jacob Nieto, an immigrant from England and rabbi at San Francisco’s Reform Temple Sherith Israel, wrote ironically in 1911, “The Sierras perform the same kind of unkind office for California that the sea does for Great Britain—we are insular in our prejudices.”⁵

On the Pacific Coast young Jewish men pursued economic opportunities similar to their colleagues elsewhere in America. But Jews who remained after the Gold Rush saw their adventure as part of America’s most far-flung effort at pioneering. The extraordinary port at the Golden Gate made San Francisco, like Chicago in the Midwest, the central place and transforming node for an entire region.⁶ It became an “instant city,” where “the empty heights of society were occupied by men and women, regardless of background or creed, who were there early enough and were fortunate enough to become rich.” And a disproportionate number of those who established the city’s first commercial ventures were Jews.⁷ As individual Jews reoriented their layered personalities to new homes, their religious identities were affected by their new geographic location and secular status.

A key date for measuring the status of Jews in the Pacific West is 1880, because by then Jewish families had become mercantile anchors of the region’s new commercial towns. The most successful had established partnerships with gentiles in creating regional financial and transportation infrastructure, and their prominence as merchants made them visible pillars of the struggle for civic order.⁸ They had endowed their sons and daughters with religious, fraternal, and philanthropic institutions to cement their own communities. Despite exclusion of Jews from city clubs established by the gentile elite, by the 1890s Jewish Concordia clubs, with a list of their members, were included in the elite social registers in San Francisco and Portland.⁹

Internally, between 1900 and the mid-1920s, western Jewish communities developed a sense of place that allowed their leaders to believe that their collective status was superior to that of Jewish communities in the East. The large contingents of east European and Sephardic immigrants then arriving moved into lower-income residential neighborhoods, where they created the West’s first traditionally Jewish landscapes. But even these neighborhoods had open space for new homes. Their neighbors were not only familiar immigrants like Italians, but people from Mexico and Japan, whose homelands, places of worship, and public rituals tied Pacific Coast cities not to a receding Europe but to a beckoning Pacific Rim. In addition, descendants of Jewish pioneer families hoped to create an inclusive Jewish communal leadership through fraternal and philanthropic links. They recruited east European and Sephardic leaders into consolidated B’nai B’rith lodges, which became the largest in the country.¹⁰ New federations for philanthropy included charities established by the Orthodox, Orthodox laymen served on federation boards, and columns by Orthodox rabbis and laymen were included in community newspapers.¹¹

In the 1920s, as Los Angeles developed a heavy industrial sector, it surpassed San Francisco as the region’s economic, demographic, and cultural hub. Oil refining, automobile assembly and rubber tire plants, and federal investment in the port at Long Beach created the Los Angeles boom. But, as in the Gold Rush, Jews pioneered in shaping consumer demands.¹² Those with extraordinary chutzpah created motion pictures, the region’s most celebrated industry and the nation’s fifth largest, while hundreds of others created a unique sportswear industry, which grew in the 1930s because of its link to motion picture costume design.¹³ By 1930 Los Angeles had become the nation’s fourth largest city, and its Jewish population, estimated at eighty-two thousand, had doubled that of San Francisco. Over half the Jews on the Pacific Coast, as over half in the Northeast, now lived in one city. All manner of Jewish organizations now held their conventions in southern California, and both religious and lay leaders emphasized an ideology of public service and brotherhood to integrate Jewish communities into regional civic life. The continued separation from the rest of the country, which drew communal leaders along the Pacific Coast together, the array of new Jewish architectural landmarks completed in the 1920s, and the immense respect that the gentile commercial elite afforded their Jewish counterparts, made Jews of the West believe that their status in this newest region of the new land remained unique.¹⁴

From 1849 through World War I, commercial and social life for the Pacific region focused on San Francisco. Its sixteen thousand Jews in the 1870s comprised the second largest Jewish population in the country and 8 percent of the city’s total.¹⁵ Immigrants from Bavaria like Lewis Gerstle, his brother-in-law Louis Sloss, and Aaron Fleishacker, whose Sacramento stores had prospered by supplying gold miners, relocated to San Francisco, where they invested in whatever seemed inviting. Their ventures ranged from fur trading and salmon canning in Alaska to railroads in central California and to light industry and real estate in San Francisco.¹⁶ As facilitators for a chain migration of aspiring Jewish merchants, Sloss and his colleagues provided merchandise on credit to young men who peddled to mining camps and moved on to extraordinary commercial and civic careers.¹⁷ By 1880 not only did San Francisco hold 21 percent of the population of the Pacific region, but its merchants, including Jews, handled 99 percent of the region’s imports. As the city became the region’s manufacturing center, Jewish men like Levi Straus in clothing and Isadore Zellerbach in paper products helped it to produce more goods than the other twenty-four cities of the region combined.¹⁸ In 1890, I. W. Hellman, a Bavarian immigrant merchant who had become the most influential banker in Los Angeles, was recruited by railroad barons to manage a major bank in San Francisco. By 1905 it had merged with the Wells Fargo Bank, and Hellman was the most respected and influential banker in the region. Even before his move from Los Angeles he had been appointed to the board of regents of the University of California, a position he held until his death in 1920.¹⁹

As Moses Rischin has argued, San Francisco Jews participated in an unprecedented expansion of culture as well as commerce. In 1880 four English-language Jewish newspapers were published there, as many as in New York. Young men a continent as well as an ocean away from their origins turned to one another for mutual support. San Francisco boasted several Jewish mutual aid societies, like the aptly named Eureka Benevolent Society, and by 1880 had five permanent synagogues as well as seven B’nai B’rith lodges. The merchants of Bavarian origins expressed their pride through Temple Emanu-El, erected in 1866 on Sutter Street as an instant civic landmark. Its twin domes were visible to all ships sailing through the passage known as “the Golden Gate.” As Professor Rischin aptly notes, “Like no other building in the nation, the region’s cathedral synagogue dramatically came to symbolize the freedom, equality, openness and fraternity of America and the West for Jews and others.”²⁰ Emanu-El’s entry in the 1879 city directory informs the public that the lot and building cost $185,000, more than the amount expended on all but one church.²¹ When Congregation Sherith Israel, which welcomed men of varying geographic origins, completed a new edifice in 1905 at California and Webster Streets, its magnificent stained glass window depicted Moses bringing down the Ten Commandments, not from Mt. Sinai but from El Capitan to the Yosemite Valley.²²

By 1880, in towns along the Pacific Coast, Jews had established themselves as “Main Street” merchants. Like the general population, Jews concentrated in northern California, though individuals and families scattered to most small towns, where they were often from 2 to 4 percent of the population. Through the early twentieth century Jewish men supplied farmers and ranchers on credit during the growing seasons and in exchange took gold nuggets, grain, cattle, wool, and hides after harvest. In Los Angeles the firm of Newmark and Kremer advertised in the 1872 city directory, “will exchange produce of all descriptions for hides, lumber, barley, beans, corn, potatoes, butter, eggs; our charge will be 5% on original invoice.”²³ Harris Newmark, whose narrative of Los Angeles Jewry provides so many details about commercial and social life in general, shipped the hides and grain he bought from local farmers and ranchers to his brother in San Francisco.

As commercial farming, timber, and light industry came to dominate the region, the sons of immigrants coordinated their business careers with life cycle transitions and reinforced their image as pillars of civic stability. The chain of migration that had drawn their parents from Central European villages in the 1850s now launched them in the 1870s and 1880s on more complex mercantile apprenticeships around the region, from larger cities to smaller towns and back. City directories in the late 1870s carry engraved advertisements for hundreds of general merchandise houses owned by Jews. In Albany, Oregon in 1880 over two dozen Jewish storekeepers from half a dozen European states were interspersed with other businesses over the three blocks of the main business street. In such a small town, merchants lived within a few blocks of their stores and they and their families were known to everyone.

The image of Jewish mercantile cohesiveness persisted into the 1920s in a large city like Spokane, where forty-three Jewish-owned jewelry, clothing, and furniture stores clustered on six consecutive blocks of three parallel downtown business streets. Only four blocks to the south the Reform temple and the Orthodox synagogue stood a block apart, and the vast majority of Jewish families resided within walking distance of both structures. While Jews were not more numerous than other merchants, their narrow lines of merchandising, the close proximity of their stores and homes, as well as their cohesion in synagogues, fraternal lodges, and benefit societies created the image of an intense community integral to the city’s commercial success.²⁴

By the late 1850s the pioneer Jewish merchants felt sufficiently secure to start families. Most found wives through business or family ties either in German villages or in cities like San Francisco, Portland, or Los Angeles.²⁵ Most women were considerably younger than their husbands, started to have children shortly after marriage, and usually bore from four to eight, though many children died before reaching adulthood. Separated from their mothers and sisters by thousands of miles, Jewish women turned to one another to surmount family tragedies. While Jewish women throughout the Western world were adding public responsibilities to their family practices, in cities like San Francisco and Portland—in conjunction with Protestant and Catholic women—they built the social infrastructure.²⁶ From the founding of Pacific Coast cities, Catholic nuns and Protestant wives had provided medical, educational, and charitable services to sustain newly located families. Though most of their work was confined to their respective religious communities, women did cooperate across communal lines where broader civic interest required. All along the coast nuns from the Sisters of Charity, the Sisters of the Holy Name, or the Sisters of Providence started boarding schools and hospitals that served non-Catholics as well.²⁷ In most cities Protestant women from merchant families founded clinics, homes for unwed mothers, as well as Sunday Schools, and sponsored missions in the overwhelmingly male waterfront districts to combat alcoholism and violence and to promote Christian observance.

Jewish women began by forming benevolent societies, often connected informally to a synagogue, to assist their own families. By 1857 in San Francisco, 1870 in Los Angeles, and 1874 in Portland, the need to provide emergency services, including the ritual need to bury women and children, led the women to form Jewish Ladies Relief Societies or Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Societies.²⁸ The organizations, while reflecting the patriarchal character of Jewish families, also enabled women to gain greater knowledge of their growing cities and some sense of gender autonomy. For example, in both Los Angeles and Portland several husbands of members served either as officers or advisers for organizing the meetings, dispensing funds, and creating an endowment by investing in real estate. By the early 1880s, however, male officers had been supplanted by women who raised large sums of money to pay off the temples’ mortgages.

In the late 1880s when Reform rabbis were encouraged by Rabbi Kaufman Kohler to transform an abstract “Mission of Israel” into a concrete social gospel,²⁹ they recruited the wives and adult daughters of their members to provide assistance to the growing numbers of poor Jewish families. In San Francisco, a group called “The Helpers,” whose members had performed “friendly visiting” under the auspices of the Eureka Benevolent Society, worked with the Associated Charities and at first dispensed provisions and medicine to as many gentile as Jewish cases. By the mid-1890s, when the number of immigrant Jews increased and the local economy declined, a much larger proportion of their services focused on Jewish families.³⁰ In a concerted effort to bring modern criteria of welfare assistance to Jewish communal services, Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger of Emanu-El borrowed from a model developed at New York’s Temple Emanu-El to initiate a Sisterhood of Personal Service. The sisterhood created an employment service for adults, acquired a clubhouse in the mixed immigrant district “South of Market” to initiate recreation and vocational training for boys and girls, and soon started cooking, sewing, and child-rearing classes for immigrant mothers.³¹

The Council of Jewish Women was founded in 1893 in Chicago, and by 1896 a “section” in Portland became the first on the West Coast. By 1900 sections had been founded in San Francisco and in Seattle, though the section in Los Angeles was not founded until 1909. Council sections soon shifted their focus from study groups under rabbinical direction examining Jewish history and literature to the welfare of poor Jewish families proliferating around them. By 1906 the section in Portland rented a building to establish a Neighborhood House, while Seattle’s section created a Council House, where members and their daughter and sons prepared immigrant children for American urban conditions. The women formed clubs for girls and boys, taught classes to prepare them to participate in Jewish ceremonies at Hanukkah, Purim, and Succoth, and established relief nurseries, educational meetings for immigrant mothers, and well baby clinics.

By 1910 council sections in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco expanded their volunteer work to include more demanding intervention with public agencies. Volunteers in effect became social workers by going between immigrant households and neighborhood schools to arrange for medical and dental services and to establish after-school playgrounds. Even more ambitiously, several women became volunteer caseworkers for the new juvenile courts, where they gained supervisory powers over Jewish children placed in Jewish foster homes.³² As late as 1924 in Los Angeles, the judge of the juvenile court commended the Case Committee of the local section of the National Council of Jewish Women for its work in finding foster homes, employment, and religious instruction for sixty-seven girls remanded to its care.³³

The efficiency of the Jewish philanthropic network and the high status of Jews within the city of San Francisco was acknowledged by their collective response to the region’s most horrifying disaster, the earthquake and firestorms of April 1906. The district south of Market Street was burned out, and many Jewish immigrant families relocated to the south and east along San Bruno Road. New synagogues were built there, as was a new settlement house that included rooms for Rabbi Nieto’s Hebrew School. Emanu-El’s building was badly damaged, but Sherith Israel’s new building remained largely intact and was used by the city as a temporary courthouse. Rabbis Nieto and Voorsanger were appointed by the mayor to head emergency relief committees, while I. W. Hellman and a committee of Jewish businessmen raised funds to repair all damaged synagogues and to offer relief to displaced Jewish families. Synagogues and B’nai B’rith lodges along the coast sent relief funds, but when national Jewish charities sent investigators to determine the need for further relief, Rabbi Voorsanger and I. W. Hellman were so affronted by their findings that they refused to accept any funding from New York. The official survey of relief operations completed in 1909 was supervised by Professor Jessica Peixotto, the second woman to receive a doctorate from the University of California, and its first female professor. Professor Peixotto found that very few Jews were asking for relief from the city because the Jewish community had managed its own recovery.³⁴

The tens of thousands of east European Jewish immigrants settling into the major cities of the Pacific West by 1910 created districts that seemed facsimiles of those in cities like New York. The many small synagogues, the kosher stores along a main business street, and the network of brothers and sisters who orchestrated the migration across the continent and settled as neighbors suggests the transit of an intense cultural world. Areas like South Portland, Seattle’s Yesler Way, and Boyle Heights in Los Angeles have come to dominate the romantic lore of contemporary Jewish communities.³⁵ An article in the B’nai B’rith Messenger in 1928 lauded Boyle Heights, then housing an estimated thirty thousand Jews, as a haven for the Orthodox, with a large synagogue on Breed Street and several storefront synagogues, two Talmud Torahs, and two public libraries with collections of Yiddish books. A similar neighborly ambience existed in South Portland.³⁶ Before the earthquake in San Francisco, however, Jewish immigrants resided in a district “south of Market” dominated by male seasonal workers rather than immigrant families. Rabbi Nieto’s recollection of the district was far from romantic. Parents, he wrote, neglected the religious instruction of their children “who were arrested by the police for pilfering in fruit stalls on Saturday and Sunday when they had no public school work to do.”³⁷

East European Jews may have created a neighborhood ambience, but, unlike on the Lower East Side, they never dominated any. And their children learned to socialize with immigrants unique to the Pacific Coast—Mexicans and Japanese. A photo of the eighth-grade class of Seattle’s Pacific Elementary School in 1917 shows that twelve of the forty-two pupils were Asian, while school records for South Portland’s Failing School in 1920 show 40 percent of the pupils were Jewish and 17 percent Italian.³⁸ As late as 1940 the WPA-sponsored guide to Los Angeles referred to Boyle Heights as “a section teeming with Jews and Mexicans.”³⁹ After extensive interviewing, one scholar concluded that “Japanese, Armenian, Chinese, Mexicans and other immigrant groups lived in Boyle Heights after 1930, yet survey respondents reported few unpleasant experiences.”⁴⁰

In addition, by 1905, a growing number of Sephardic Jews from Rhodes and the Istanbul area settled in Seattle and sent relatives to Portland and Los Angeles, where they created a separate economic and social niche. Starting modestly, Sephardic men opened fish and vegetable stalls in the public markets and bootblack stands in the downtown areas. In Los Angeles many also sold flowers on street corners until they were able to open stores that grew into a network of over forty shops. Despite their similar economic base, families from different Ottoman cities at first formed separate clubs for religious worship, and individual men preferred to associate with immigrants from Greece, with whom they shared Mediterranean languages and cuisine, rather than with Ashkenazic Jews.

In Los Angeles Congregation Beth David Nusach Sephard was opened on Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights, but most Sephardic families in the 1920s moved southwest to an area near 56th and Normandie.⁴¹ Los Angeles in 1930 had at least five Sephardic congregations, stretching from Boyle Heights to West Adams.⁴² Orthodox leaders were concerned at the factional divisions among the Sephardim, and in Los Angeles Rabbi Meyer Winkler of Conservative Sinai Congregation urged the Rhodeslis of the Peace and Progress Society to participate in the larger Jewish community. Rabbi David Essrig of Beth Israel led Talmudic discussions at Beth Israel Anshe Sephard, and Congregation Talmud Torah’s Rabbi S. M. Neches, who had come to Los Angeles from Jerusalem, organized a club for Palestinian Jews that included several Sephardim.⁴³

Scholars agree that east European Jews coming west, as well as the Sephardim, were generally intent on opening small businesses rather than seeking industrial labor.⁴⁴ By comparing the employment profiles of Seattle’s Orthodox Congregation Bikur Cholim with that of Spokane’s Reform Temple Emanu-el we can appreciate how the small business orientation of Pacific Coast Jewry extended across denominational lines. Both synagogues date from 1892, but Bikur Cholim evolved from a friendship society that conducted prayer services, visited the sick, and buried the dead, while Emanu-el from its founding followed a Reform ritual and aspired to include the city’s most prominent Jewish families.⁴⁵ Bikur Cholim’s members in 1910 served Seattle’s large working class, many as proprietors of junk and pawn shops, a few of whom even lived next to their waterfront businesses. In 1920 about 30 percent of Emanu-el’s members were either clerks in large businesses or professionals in businesses services, while a few others had become woolen manufacturers or timber brokers. But what is most striking about the comparison is how similar were the work orientations of the two groups. Emanu-el’s retailers might cluster on Spokane’s primary business blocks, and Bikur Cholim’s along Seattle’s waterfront. But large contingents of both sold clothing, jewelry, and furniture, and neither group included industrial workers. In the most remote and last settled region of the country, the economic base of both Orthodox and Reform congregations was focused on the same narrow lines of entrepreneurship.

By the end of World War I, in each of the major cities, Jewish immigrant families were served by a network of social workers who gained broad public recognition for their expertise. In Portland Ida Loewenberg began as a volunteer with Neighborhood House and, after formal schooling in Chicago, returned as a fulltime superintendent.⁴⁶ Seattle’s section in 1908 brought Mrs. Hannah Schwartz from San Francisco to live in their newly rented Neighborhood House, and in the early 1920s the women of the Hebrew Benevolent Society recruited Miss May Goldsmith from Portland as their executive secretary.⁴⁷ The driving force in the Bay Area for the training of Jewish women for social work was Professor Jessica Peixotto, who had prepared the major study of San Francisco relief work after the earthquake and served as the secretary of child welfare under the Council of National Defense during World War I.⁴⁸ The most experienced social worker was Ethel Feineman, a graduate of Hull House and the resident head of the home for working girls erected by the Emanu-El Sisterhood in 1915.⁴⁹

When Portland’s juvenile court needed a child psychologist in 1918, it hired Samuel C. Kohs, whose career and contacts helped define the interlocking network of Jewish social work in the Pacific region. Originally from New York, Kohs earned a doctorate from Stanford and became a psychology professor at Reed College. He also taught at the University of Oregon’s extension service in Portland, participated in the B’nai B’rith, and spoke throughout the region for Zionist organizations.⁵⁰ By 1924 Kohs had moved to the Bay Area as the superintendent of the Jewish Federation of Oakland, where he put into practice his view that Jewish social work required a strong infusion of cultural education.⁵¹ Here he joined Irving Lipsitch, superintendent of both the Eureka Benevolent Society and of the San Francisco Federation, and Rabbi Rudolph Coffee of Temple Sinai of Oakland, who also headed the statewide Jewish Committee of Personal service that ministered to Jews in state prisons. In January 1924 the governor appointed Coffee to the State Board of Charities and Corrections, with responsibility for supervising state prisons. In 1933 Coffee left the rabbinate to become chaplain at San Quentin.⁵²

In 1926 Irving Lipsitch moved to Los Angeles to succeed the renowned Boris Bogen as director of the Federation of Jewish Social Welfare.⁵³ Lipsitch also became the manager of West Coast fund-raising for the Joint Distribution Committee and for the United Palestine Appeal.⁵⁴ Kohs then succeeded Lipsitch at the Eureka Benevolent Society and the San Francisco Federation of Jewish Charities.⁵⁵ Despite frequent conflicts between Kohs and Lipsitch over the best practices for Jewish social work, the recognition they received from local political leaders enhanced the sense within the Jewish elite that their communities were integral to professionalizing social welfare in the region.⁵⁶ By the late 1920s Jews were recognized in major cities because of their disproportionate charitable contributions. As Rabbi Louis Newman of San Francisco’s Emanu-El noted, “The high standards of philanthropy in San Francisco are due in large measure to Jewish contributions of money and intelligence.”⁵⁷

As Jewish communities became more cohesive by constructing social and recreational centers, federating their charitable institutions, and participating in national fund-raising efforts, community leaders transmuted the pioneering heritage to mean that Jews must support nonpartisan civic activism. Reform rabbis, newspaper editors, and clubwomen honored Jewish public officials as exemplary citizens, not as spokesmen for an ethnic community. Paragons of Jewish political achievement were not “bosses” like Abe Ruff of San Francisco or Joseph Simon of Portland, who might appoint Jewish friends to public office. Instead true representatives of the Jewish community were “non-partisans,” like David Solis Cohen, who served in the 1890s as Portland’s police commissioner, San Francisco’s long-time Republican Congressman Julius Kahn and his wife, Florence, who succeeded him, and Simon Lubin of Sacramento, who in 1912 was appointed by Governor Hiram Johnson to California’s Immigration Commission.⁵⁸

Between 1900 and 1910 several Jewish pioneer families created the commercial equivalent of progressive citizenship by turning their large retail businesses into sophisticated “department stores.” The elite in the region’s major cities could now identify sophisticated taste and architectural innovation with Jewish salesmanship. By apprenticing young relatives at eastern department stores like John Wanamaker and Macy’s,⁵⁹ the new Pacific Coast emporia imported new techniques like set prices, window displays featuring expensive items rather than a clutter of all that the store had to offer, and amenities like tearooms and the free delivery of merchandise.⁶⁰ High-rise buildings for Lipman, Wolfe and Meier and Frank in Portland, the City of Paris in San Francisco, and Hamburgers in Los Angeles sprawled over entire blocks to realign the city’s shopping core.⁶¹ In San Francisco after the earthquake I. Magnin and Company and Raphael Weil and Company relocated from the old business center along Market Street to the intersection of Grant and Geary near Union Square, which became the new center of elegant shopping.⁶² In Pacific Coast cities few other tall buildings housed a single firm, other than utilities or banks, so the Jewish department store symbolized not only sophisticated shopping but a modernized urban core.

Commensurate with a commercial elegance that consciously emulated national standards came a sophisticated cultural leadership from a new generation of Reform rabbis with whom elite Protestant ministers could “dialogue” over the ideology of Brotherhood. Jews were no longer represented by self-conscious foreigners claiming a stake in a new land, but by fellow Americans who eloquently expressed common values, whose rituals—conducted almost entirely in English—were fully comprehensible, and who were routinely invited to speak from Protestant pulpits and at university convocations. Rabbis Jacob Nieto, Samuel Koch, Jonah Wise, and Edgar Magnin spoke for decades to the gentile public and became Jewish partners in the quest for humanistic pluralism. When Rabbi Julius Liebert in Spokane spoke on the “Brotherhood of Man” to the Unitarians, when rabbis and social workers agreed to raise funds to save a Congregational Church in Los Angeles, or when Rabbi Edgar Magnin spoke to a joint meeting of the Knights of Columbus and the B’nai B’rith, Jewish community newspapers saw centuries of “misunderstanding” fading away.⁶³

The generation of Reform rabbis in the American West from 1910 to 1930 integrated their pluralistic civic ideal into congregational life. When their activism led them into strident conflict with prominent congregants, as occurred with Stephen Wise at Beth Israel in Portland in 1905 and with his protégé Louis Newman at Emanu-El in San Francisco in the late 1920s, they left for New York. The more diplomatic rabbis cultivated the enthusiasm of congregants by building contacts with Protestant clergymen and gentile civic leaders. Rabbi Koch in Seattle belonged to so many organizations that his board asked him to “refrain from participation in political affairs in a public manner,” a request with which he generally complied.⁶⁴ But in June 1916 his congregants welcomed President Suzzalo of the University of Washington as a guest speaker.⁶⁵ Jonah Wise, a son of the founder of Hebrew Union College, was so admired as a pubic speaker that he was cultivated for a decade by President Prince Lucien Campbell of the University of Oregon to deliver lectures and even an introductory course on Judaism. In 1929 Wise’s successor, Henry Berkowitz, delivered the baccalaureate address at the graduation ceremony of Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis.⁶⁶

The initial wave of Orthodox Jews who arrived on the Pacific slope between the 1880s and 1900 also appreciated the need to create a niche as Americans. Before their arrival virtually all had spent time elsewhere in America, where they learned English as well as the ability to accommodate the secular demands of the new life. The oldest consciously Orthodox synagogues, like Nevek Tzedek in Portland and Beth Israel in Los Angeles that date from the early 1890s, were often veering toward what would become the Conservative movement and support of cultural Zionism. Some of their leaders were veterans of utopian farming communities in the Dakotas, northern California, and Oregon, who demonstrated their virtuosity as pioneers by opening successful businesses once they moved to the cities.⁶⁷ A new wave of Orthodox synagogues like Shaarei Torah in Portland, Knesseth Israel in San Francisco, and Congregation Talmud Torah in Los Angeles that date from the 1910s had a more strictly religious focus. Their congregations were augmented by relatives coming directly from Russia who desired Orthodox religious practices. Even they, however, absorbed the sense of congregational autonomy that marked the urban West. When some Orthodox laymen in 1918 tried to consolidate the Orthodox synagogues of San Francisco under the leadership of a Rabbi Glazer of Montreal, dissenting congregations refused to relinquish control over ritual and Rabbi Glazer never relocated.⁶⁸

In all major Pacific Coast cities during the 1920s, Orthodox communities gained membership, constructed new buildings for worship, education, and sociability, and sponsored talks by visiting dignitaries like Gedalia Bublick.⁶⁹ Talmud Torahs were the pride of Bikur Cholim in Seattle, and itinerant Yiddish theater companies played at local theaters and found a special reception in Los Angeles. Yet Orthodox leaders expressed anxiety over the future of authentic Judaism, because their great distance from centers of religious study seemed to exacerbate the allure that American culture held out to their children. The same issue of the Los Angeles B’nai B’rith Messenger that announced the construction of a new building for Conservative Sinai Temple reported a meeting at Klein’s Kosher Restaurant where Rabbi Winkler of Sinai, and Rabbis Neches, as well as several leading Orthodox laymen complained that only 16 percent of the local Jewish young people were enrolled in Jewish schools.⁷⁰

How the content of a Jewish education should be altered to attract children in an overwhelmingly secular world remained a dilemma for lay and rabbinic leaders all along the coast. Despite the frustrations, the quality of educational leadership was surprisingly strong in a district so far removed from sources of traditional Judaism. Spokesmen for Orthodoxy agreed that they could not start Jewish day schools and that they wanted Jewish educators as professionally trained as were teachers in public schools, so they debated the content and pedagogy for a much reduced curriculum. Sam Prottas, a lay leader at Seattle’s Bikur Cholim, said that his Talmud Torah, which enrolled over two hundred pupils, should teach about “Torah.” But he did not explain what that might mean. Students graduating from the religious school at Congregation Talmud Torah of Boyle Heights gave brief speeches in Yiddish, not Hebrew, though all were to continue their Hebrew education at an afternoon “high school” recently established by the Jewish Education Association of Los Angeles.⁷¹

Several educational alternatives focused on Modern Hebrew as a cultural solvent that would perpetuate religious ritual while also revitalizing cultural nationalism. In San Francisco Rabbi Nieto’s Jewish Education Society in 1918 hired a Moses Menuhin who had come from Palestine to introduce “modern Hebrew pedagogy.”⁷² The school met in an Orthodox synagogue until a new building was erected in 1925. A second Free Hebrew School was opened at the new Jewish Community Home along San Bruno Road, and by 1926 the two schools enrolled five hundred pupils who met on weekday afternoons. Its purpose, according to Menuhin, “is to give the children an intensive cultural and religious Jewish education, with due consideration to American Jewish conditions.”⁷³

In Portland, by 1905, members of Neveh Tzedeck founded the Portland Hebrew School to express their Zionist zeal. By the 1920s Bert Treiger, who also taught Modern Hebrew at the University of Oregon’s extension program, became its principal. Dedicated to Hebrew teaching as a career, he introduced a pedagogy based on “Ivrit B’Ivrit,” by which pupils learned to turn a language first encountered in religious ritual into a vehicle for expressing their own thoughts. As its enrollment slowly grew, Treiger remained enthusiastic about the school because he had persuaded colleges and universities in the Pacific Northwest to give his graduates credit for Hebrew as a foreign language.⁷⁴

As Jewish communities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle continued to grow, fears expressed by rabbis that young people would be snared by Christian Science or by the Unitarians seemed absurd. An editorial in the B’nai B’rith Messenger in 1928 pointed to the many new structures built by Jewish philanthropy and to the religious zeal exhibited at holidays to conclude, “American Jewish culture may assume a different form from that of other times and places, but it is JEWSH CULTURE just the same and bears no aspect of deterioration.”⁷⁵ The attention that visitors to the region placed on exotic Protestant evangelists like Aime Semple McPherson or Bob Shuler seems exaggerated when compared with denominational statistics.⁷⁶ According to the federal Census of Religious Bodies, 1926, Jews were the second largest denomination in the region’s cities, behind Roman Catholics. In San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1926, Jews outnumbered Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians combined. By not differentiating between Jewish denominations, the Bureau of the Census reinforced the image of a community that had unified its lodges, federated and rationalized its charities, and had a small group of rabbis, businessmen, and secular professionals as public spokesmen.⁷⁷

Before 1920 the small number of young Pacific Coast Jews who attended college usually enrolled at schools on the East Coast, and through the 1920s young men from wealthy families still did.⁷⁸ But in the 1920s, as children of east European families were prepared to attend college, their less affluent families sent them to schools within the region. In 1910 young people from Portland, as well as those from Seattle, had been attending the University of Washington, but after 1915 dozens of young men and women in Portland enrolled at the new Reed College.⁷⁹ By the late 1920s contingents of twenty or more even attended the University of Oregon in Eugene, where sixteen of the male students had formed a fraternity as the first Jewish organization on campus. . In California most students were sent to Berkeley, with a few attending Stanford. In the mid-1920s the teachers college in Los Angeles was elevated to a branch of the state university and quickly attracted many Jewish students.⁸⁰

During the 1920s Jewish college students along the coast were made to feel part of a regional community. Newspapers carried information about Jewish literary and fraternal societies, and, in keeping with the national valorization of sports, they featured stories about Jewish athletes excelling in football, swimming, tennis, or baseball at Berkeley, Washington, or Stanford. Male students aspired to organize their own social life through new fraternities, while Jewish faculty at most of these schools helped students found Menorah Societies. By 1927 the University of Washington had a chapter of ZBT, which the Scribe claimed was composed primarily of Portlanders.⁸¹ Reed College’s Menorah Society traveled several times to Seattle to debate with their counterparts at the University of Washington, and it soon expanded to a Portland Menorah that included students at the city’s professional schools. The Menorah Society at UCLA began with essay contests, but soon hosted a regional convention.⁸² Delegations attended from the University of Washington, the University of California, and UCLA, as did representatives from the University of Southern California, Stanford, Fresno State, and the University of Arizona.

A study of Jewish undergrads at Berkeley by Sol Silverman, a 1923 graduate, estimated an enrollment of about five hundred in 1926, with about five hundred more at other West Coast colleges.⁸³ In 1927 the B’nai B’rith brought young Reform rabbi Benjamin Goldstein to Berkeley to found its fifth Hillel House. Rabbi Louis Newman, a former national president of the Inter-Collegiate Menorah Society, reported that Berkeley Hillel brought a large proportion of the Jewish students together to foster a sense of community that the more selective fraternities and the Menorah Society could not. Rabbi Goldstein told audiences along the coast that Hillel enabled students to organize their own Jewish group life so that after graduation they would be prepared to provide leadership in their home communities.⁸⁴ According to an editorial in the Scribe, Hillel work had created a new pride in Jewish identity among the growing contingents of Jewish students at state universities.⁸⁵

Table 9.4 Jews and Other Selected Denominations in Selected Pacific Coast Cities

Los Angeles in the 1920s more than doubled its population to 1.2 million, with Jews perhaps 7 percent of the total. The diversity of their origins, their large Orthodox component, their wide geographical distribution, and their ability to support a great variety of institutions created a Jewish community new to the American West. As Los Angeles outstripped San Francisco in construction of new religious and philanthropic buildings, especially the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, the new orphanage with its innovative cottage system at Del Mar, and the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, its new preeminence as the regional Jewish center became obvious.

The Jewish population grew, as it had during the Gold Rush, because it could provide unique services. During the 1920s, in Seattle and Portland, Jewish entrepreneurs created a cluster of small women’s garment factories in downtown loft buildings, while San Francisco had an authentic clothing district between Chinatown and Market Street. The far more rapid expansion of Los Angeles, however, induced between one and two hundred small manufacturers to create the largest clothing district west of Chicago. A district emerged in loft buildings along Los Angeles Street and Broadway between Second and Tenth Streets. Unlike New York, however, the great majority of the workers were not Jews but Mexican women, though Russian Jews were among the more skilled cutters.⁸⁶

The residential patterns of the Pacific Coast clothing manufacturers highlighted the internal migration of the Jewish population. In San Francisco they moved directly west of their small factories, following the car lines to the Western Addition and into newer homes in the Richmond district, north of Golden Gate Park. Emanu-El and Sherith Israel soon relocated there, in what became the new center of the city’s Jewish community. In Portland clothing manufactures followed a car line on East Glisan Street, with the most affluent settling farthest out in the Laurelhurst neighborhood. In Los Angeles the larger numbers led to a wider dispersal, but if anything the clustering in specific neighborhoods was even more intense. The residences of the one hundred and fifteen manufacturers who could be located in the 1927 Los Angeles City Directory followed clear patterns. A contingent of twenty-one manufacturers had settled in Boyle Heights, where streetcars on Brooklyn Avenue could take them easily to the garment lofts downtown. But the residential trajectory of the majority of garment manufacturers illustrates how the industry promoted the social integration of upwardly mobile Jews into the wider city. Like the general population of Los Angeles, most Jewish clothing manufacturers were moving to the west side or to residential cities like Pasadena and Alhambra that lay north and east of Boyle Heights. A group of thirty-two men, for example, moved to an area that held not only the offices of the smaller motion picture producers, as well as Paramount Studios and Twentieth Century Fox, but new temples for Congregation B’nai B’rith and Emanu-El as well as Sinai Congregation, Temple Beth-El, Temple Israel, and the Hollywood Jewish Center. So prosperous had this region suddenly become that the owners of downtown department stores like Bullocks and the May Company built a new shopping district along Wilshire, where the anchor stores were even more glamorous than those in the central business core.⁸⁷ Another group of thirteen clothing manufacturers was scattered over the West Adams Street area, the site of the new West Adams Hebrew Congregation. Eight others, including the prominent manufacturer Joseph Zukin, settled near a fringe of the movie colony in far-off Venice, which boasted Congregation Mishcan Tephilo.⁸⁸

The new affluence of the 1920s allowed clothing designed and manufactured in Los Angeles to gain unique exposure through the region’s glamorous new industry, the motion pictures. The movie industry has been analyzed as a revolutionary cultural tool that transformed popular consciousness,⁸⁹ but its immigrant entrepreneurs saw it as a business for entertainment. By late 1926 an estimated seventy-five thousand people worked in some aspect of film production, distribution, and viewing in the Los Angeles area.⁹⁰ The arrival of the moguls and their many family members added a new layer of affluence, visibility, and cosmopolitanism to the region’s Jewish life. Community newspapers chronicled their achievements, and the B’nai B’rith Messenger carried a biographical column on Jewish production professionals like casting directors, photographers, and directors. Though the moguls may have been snubbed in the 1920s by the Hellmans and the Newmarks at the Hillcrest Country Club, they were carefully courted for philanthropic causes.⁹¹ In 1926 Louis B. Mayer, much to the delight of the descendants of the old merchant families, agreed to be the city chairman of the United Jewish Appeal and to host a dinner of Hollywood luminaries to raise funds for the United Jewish Campaign. When the Federation of Jewish Welfare Organizations in 1928 sought to replace the old Kaspare Cohn Hospital with a modern Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, the largest fund-raisers were Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, who headed the Motion Picture Division and who served on the hospital’s board. When the City of Hope sanitarium at Duarte needed funds, the Warner brothers hosted a “mid-night gala” highlighted by Fanny Brice and Al Jolson.⁹²

Relatives of the moguls and the studios’ salaried workers supported a variety of Judaisms in the neighborhoods of West Los Angeles. Louis B. Mayer’s father-in-law, Hyman Shenberg, came from Boston to become rabbi of Congregation Knesseth Israel, while B. P. Shulberg’s father-in-law and the parents of other studio heads rented a Hollywood bungalow, which studio carpenters transformed into an Orthodox shul. The officers and board of directors of Temple Israel of Hollywood in 1928 consisted of executives of Fox and Universal Studios, including Sol Wurtzel, John Stone, E. D. Laemmle, and J. P. Fox.⁹³ Rabbis cultivated movie people to raise funds to create the largest and most diversified set of religious institutions west of Chicago, and city directories indicate that during the 1920s more new synagogues and community centers were built in Los Angeles than in the rest of the Pacific region combined.

The shifting authority of rabbinic personalities as well as the close ties within the regional rabbinate was dramatized in the late 1920s in successive temple dedications. As Samuel Hecht and Jacob Nieto died, as Jonah Wise and Louis Newman left for pulpits in New York, and as movie wealth transformed Congregation B’nai B’rith into the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Edgar Magnin emerged as Jewry’s regional spokesman. When Beth Israel in Portland dedicated its new building in April 1928, Magnin came as featured speaker to honor his former Hebrew Union College classmate and Beth Israel’s new rabbi, Henry Berkowitz. Other speakers included former Rabbi Jonah Wise, Rabbi Samuel Koch of Seattle, and Cantor Reuben Rinder of Emanu-El.⁹⁴ When the Wilshire Boulevard temple was dedicated in June 1929. Rabbi Magnin summoned the regional rabbinic illuminati, including Rabbis Koch, Berkowitz, Coffee, Lissauer, and even Rabbi Louis Newman. Berkowitz and Newman spoke on Friday evening, while the other rabbis shared time with moguls Louis B Mayer and Jack Warner and the banker Marco Hellman at the main event on Saturday. While San Francisco’s Sherith Israel in the late 1920s proposed to raise $150,00 for a new athletic and social facility called a temple house, Congregation B’nai B’rith had pledged over $1.5 million to complete its three-building complex.⁹⁵ Louis Newman, though viewing Pacific Coast Jewry as “in a wilderness,”⁹⁶ nevertheless prophesied after visiting Los Angeles in 1927 that “in a few years there will be two major centers of Jewish creative effort in this land, New York and Los Angeles.”⁹⁷

Jewish regional prominence was formally recognized in 1928, when gentile business leaders in Seattle and those in Portland selected Nathan Eckstein and Ben Selling respectively as the first citizens of their cities.⁹⁸ In Los Angeles Louis H Cole, spokesman for the American Jewish Committee and the Masonic lodge officer given most credit for building the Shrine Auditorium, received similar recognition.⁹⁹ In San Francisco Milton Esberg, who had married into the Lilienthal banking family, was considered one of the city’s four key figures in public life.¹⁰⁰ Louis Newman, always skeptical of the moral depth of western Jewry, nevertheless wrote in 1929, “The high rank of Western Jewry in the general commonwealth is taken for granted. . . . It is edifying to behold that the very leaders of prominence in the general community are at the same time the foremost Jewish spokesmen, communal workers, and philanthropists.”¹⁰¹

The import of Jewish regional status was marked in San Francisco on March 31, 1930, when the Board of Supervisors began its meeting with a lengthy memorial to Rabbi Nieto, who had died five days before. Rabbi Nieto had been the clerical face of Jewish activism in the region’s first metropolis since the mid-1890s. The Board of Supervisors, with Mayor Rolph presiding, passed a resolution that read in part “the said Rabbi Jacob Nieto was identified with the civic life of our community for nearly forty years . . . and by his passing San Francisco suffers an irreparable loss.” But an equal tribute to Jewish leadership was provided by the presence of ex-supervisor Milton Marks and supervisors Jesse Colman (1921–1947) and Jefferson Peyser (1929–1933), who spoke as Nieto’s Jewish comrades. Supervisor and future mayor Angelo Rossi, after noting Nieto’s endearing personal traits, concluded that, above all, he “was democratic. He was a civic leader.”¹⁰² Such was the image that Pacific Coast Jewry believed it had earned for itself.

The proud and insular image that Pacific Coast Jewry projected as late as 1930 was eclipsed by the extraordinary growth of the region and of its Jewish population during and after World War II. As had been true in the past, individual Jews in unprecedented numbers quite selectively chose to join the national migration away from the industrial northeast to the new economy growing up in the West. Thousands of Jewish veterans who had passed through Los Angeles during the war returned between 1946 and the mid-1950s, partly because of the climate and certainly because of defense contracts, which were triggering immense regional growth.¹⁰³ The demand for new housing was met largely by Jewish builders like Larry Weinberg, Louis Boyer, and Eli Broad, while savings and loan institutions owned in part by Jews like Mark Taper provided mortgage money.¹⁰⁴ The growth of television increased demand for studios to produce new programs, and the sportswear industry grew steadily, until in the 1990s Los Angeles passed New York as the largest locale for clothing production in the nation.¹⁰⁵ By 1960 Los Angeles already held the second largest Jewish population in the nation, over half a million, and, with the concurrent growth of southeast Florida as a national retirement center, the central place of New York as the economic, cultural, and even demographic focus of American Jewry was seriously challenged.¹⁰⁶

The legacy of the Jewish pioneer experience in the West had further resonance for a growing proportion of America’s Jews. By the 1980s Western cities like Phoenix, San Diego, and Las Vegas were growing, at rates that matched that of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s, to become among the nation’s largest. Young well-educated Jews, many from eastern and midwestern cities, were disproportionately among those seeking opportunities.¹⁰⁷ In sprawling suburbs like Poway, Scottsdale, and Henderson, young families added to communities of eighty thousand or more Jews that eclipsed in size the declining Jewish communities of cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. In addition, perhaps as many as thirty thousand Jewish émigrés from Iran, most quite prosperous, have since 1979 created a unique community centered primarily in Beverley Hills.¹⁰⁸ As in Los Angeles in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, so in Phoenix, San Diego, and Las Vegas in the 1980s and 1990s, innovative entrepreneurs like Steve Wynn in the gaming industry and Irwin Jacobs, a professor of engineering at UC San Diego, have had a major impact on local economies and on Jewish philanthropy. Dozens of new synagogues have been built and revitalized federations have raised funds for Jewish community centers, day schools, and retirement homes.

Equally important, Los Angeles has become the regional center of Jewish politics and culture. Starting in the 1950s, representatives of predominantly Jewish districts for the first time placed issues of civil rights and the defense of Israel on local political agendas, and by the 1990s Westside congressmen and media moguls were the most prominent fund-raisers for the national Democratic Party. New institutions like the Skirball Museum and the Wiesenthal Center and Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles have brought Jewish culture and history to the attention of the larger community and have developed national reputations, while the retired insurance billionaire, Eli Broad, and the architect Frank Gehry have emerged as the leading sponsors of art collecting, philanthropy, and civic design in the region and well beyond.¹⁰⁹ Cedar-Sinai Hospital, in conjunction with the school of medicine at UCLA, has become the largest medical complex west of New York City and is supported largely by Jewish philanthropy and government grants. In a sign of an incipient struggle for national leadership, the seminary at the University of Judaism and local branches of the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League have each engaged in acrimonious conflicts with their national headquarters in New York. As younger Jews continue to seek careers in cities of the Pacific West, the national center of gravity continues to shift and the meaning of its founding will bulk larger in our reexamination of the national Jewish experience.¹¹⁰ Perhaps the framework for an American Jewish history will shift, from a focus on the experience of immigrant communities painfully “assimilating” on the Atlantic seaboard to a more diffuse and regional experience of people creating and building on a pioneer legacy.¹¹¹

1. On “sectionalism” and its interpretive limitations in American historical writing, see, for example, Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1969), 94–99; Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner, Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York, 1973), 210, 214, 230–31, 368–75.

2. Thomas D. Clark, “The Post–Civil War Economy in the South,” in Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Paulson, eds, Jews in the South (Baton Rouge, 1973), 166–68; Harold Hyman, Oleaner Odyssey: The Kempners of Galveston, Texas, 1854–1980 (College Station, 1990), 48, 63–64, 102; Leonard Rogoff, Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Tuscaloosa, 2001), 3, 20, 27, passim; Steven Hertzberg, Strangers Within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845–1915 (Philadelphia, 1978).

3. Mark Bauman, The Southerner as American: Jewish Style (Cincinnati, 1996), 30, concludes, “the issues raised here point to the existence of patterns across regional boundaries. They assume that the factors in American and Jewish history affecting acculturation and tradition bred greater similarities both qualitatively and quantitatively than differences.” See also Mark Bauman, “Southern Jewish Women and Their Social Service Organizations,” Journal of American Ethnic History 22.3 (Spring, 2003): 34.

4. For the role of Jews, and negative perceptions of that role, on a very different mining frontier in the late nineteenth century, see Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Randlords (New York, 1985), 197, 202–3; J. A. Hobson, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (New York, 1900), 11, 190–97.

5. Jacob Nieto, editorial in the Jewish Times, November 17, 1911, clipping in Jacob Nieto Papers, American Jewish Archives. While evidence abounds on Jewish attitudes toward being westerners, Bauman notes that “more needs to be done on attitudes of Jews in the South toward the South.” Bauman, The Southerner as American, 38, 22.

6. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 38–39, passim.

7. Gunther Barth, Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York, 1975), 173; Peter Decker, “Jewish Merchants in San Francisco: Social Mobility on the Urban Frontier,” in Moses Rischin, ed., The Jews of the West: The Metropolitan Years (Berkeley, 1979), 20; Robert E. Levinson, The Jews in the California Gold Rush (New York, 1978), 15–40.

8. Harriet Rochlin and Fred Rochlin, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West (Boston, 1984), 158–59.

9. Max Vorspan and Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles (San Marino, 1970), 104; William Toll, The Making of an Ethnic Middle Class: Portland Jewry Over Four Generations (Albany, 1982), 80–84; William Issell and Robert W Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley, 1986), 205–6.

10. William Toll, “Voluntarism and Modernization in Portland Jewry: The B’nai B’rith in the 1920s,” Western Historical Quarterly 10.1 (January 1979): 30–37. Scribe, June 22, 1928, notes that the lodges in Portland and San Francisco numbered over twenty-five hundred.

11. Community newspapers in Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles provided far better coverage to the Orthodox than did Emanu-El in San Francisco.

12. Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, 1967), 119–29.

13. “Los Angeles Becomes Style Center,” Business Week (September 14, 1940), 42; “Los Angeles’ Little Cutters,” Fortune 31 (May 1945): 134.

14. Louis Newman, “Telling It in Gath,” Scribe, February 1, 1929.

15. Moses Rischin, “The Jewish Experience in America: A View from the West,” in M. Rischin and John Livingston, eds., Jews of the American West (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 34–35.

16. Michael Zarchin, Glimpses of Jewish Life in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1964), 52–59.

17. Bernard Goldsmith interview, Portland (November 29, 1889), H. H. Bancroft Collection, Bancroft Library.

18. Issel and Cherny, San Francisco, 23–24. Goldsmith interview indicates he was mayor of Portland, built locks at Willamette Falls to enable shipping along the river, and lost $400,000 when a new railroad soon rendered river shipping obsolete.

19. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 41–42.

20. Rischin, “The Jewish Experience in America,” 36; Currier and Ives elevation map of San Francisco (1878), Map Library, University of Oregon; an editorial in EmanuEl, January 29, 1926, referred to it as “once the chief architectural ornament of the city.”

21. By contrast, the Howard Street Methodist Episcopal Church and parsonage were valued at $100,000, the First Presbyterian Church (1857), cost $60,000, and the First Methodist Episcopal Church(1871) cost $25,000. See the San Francisco City Directory, 1879 (San Francisco, 1879), 1067, 1072–73, 1075.

22. Ava F. Kahn, “Looking at America from the West to the East, 1850–1920s,” in Ava F. Kahn, ed., Jewish Life in the American West (Los Angeles, 2002), 25.

23. Quoted in Rudolf Glanz, The Jews of California from the Discovery of Gold Until 1880 (Los Angeles: Southern California Jewish Historical Society, 1960), 83.

24. Data on Spokane’s Jews has been gathered from a membership list for Temple Emanu-El, from Spokane city directories, and plotted on a street map of Spokane.

25. Social columns in Jewish newspapers for all cities in the 1920s are filled with accounts of families visiting back and forth with relatives in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

26. The extension of Jewish female nurture into the public realm in Western Europe and the United Statesis discussed in Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle, 1995), 31–34.

27. Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern Califrnia, 1853–1913, Maurice H. Newmark and Marco R. Newmark, eds. (New York, 1916), 190. On January 5, 1856, the Sisters of Charity first appeared in Los Angeles and soon conducted a school, an institute, and orphan asylum. Sydney Clevenger, “St. Vincent’s and the Sisters of Providence, Oregon’s First Permanent Hospital,” Oregon Historical Quarterly (Summer 2001): 210–21; Michael E. Engh, Frontier Faiths, Church, Temple, and Synagogue in Los Angeles, 1846–1888 (Albuquerque, 1992), 13, 79, 83–84.

28. Jewish Ladies Relief Society, Forty-eighth Annual Report (1905), in Eureka Benevolent Society Papers, box 1, file 2, Western Jewish History Center. I thank Professor Ellen Eisenberg of Willamette University for this reference.

29. Jonathan D. Sarna, “New Light on the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885,” American Jewish History 76.3 (March 1987): 358–68; Gilbert Rosenthal, Contemporary Judaism: Patterns of Survival (New York, 1986), 100–1.

30. “The Helpers,” in box 1, file 2, Eureka Benevolent Society, Western Jewish History Center. I thank Professor Ellen Eisenberg for this reference.

31. “Temporary Relief Committee,” “Employment Department,” in Third Annual Report of the Emanu-El Sisterhood for Fiscal Year 1896–97 (San Francisco, 1897), 11, 17; Rabbi Jacob Nieto, “The Charity Fad,” undated typescript, Jacob Nieto Papers, Western Jewish History Archives, Berkeley, California; Felicia Herman, “Sisterhoods of Personal Service,” in Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (New York, 1997), 1264–65.

32. William Toll, “Gender, Ethnicity and Jewish Settlement Work in the Urban West,” in Jeffrey S. Gurock and Marc Lee Raphael, eds., An Inventory of Promise: Essays on American Jewish History in Honor of Moses Rischin (Brooklyn, 1995), 299–305.

33. B’nai B’rith Messenger, January 18, 1924.

34. [Jessica Peixotto], “Relief Work of the Associated Charities from June, 1907 to June, 1909,” 281–317, copy in Jessica Peixotto Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Henry Rand Hatfield, “Jessica Blanche Peixotto,” in Essays in Social Economics in Honor of Jessica Blanche Peixotto (Berkeley, 1935), 9.

35. Seattle Jewish Transcript, January 3, 1930, notes that the Women’s Club of the Arbeiter Ring met on December 28 to install new officers and sent a delegation to Tacoma to meet with their club.

36. B’nai B’rith Messenger, March 9, 1928; interview with Gaulda Jermuloske Hahn, June 10 and December 17, 1979, Jewish Historical Society of Oregon.

37. Jacob Nieto, unnamed and undated typescript, Jacob Nieto papers, American Jewish Archives.

38. Molly Cone, Howard Droker, Jacqueline Williams, Family of Strangers, Building a Jewish Community in Washington State (Seattle, 2003), 147–48. Cone, Family of Strangers, 147–48; William Toll, “Ethnicity and Stability: The Italians and Jews of South Portland, 1900–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 54.2 (May 1985): 175.

39. Los Angeles: A Guide to the City and Its Environs (New York, 1941), 169.

40. Wendy Elliott, “The Jews of Boyle Heights, 1900–1950: The Melting Pot of Los Angeles,” Southern California Quarterly 78.1 (1996): 6–7.

41. Aron Hason, “The Sephardic Jews of Rhodes in Los Angeles,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly (July 1974): 247–48, 252.

42. “Dr. Spivak Ends Visit to Seattle,” Jewish Transcript, March 18, 1924; Los Angeles City Directory, 1930 (Los Angeles, 1930), 2508.

43. B’nai B’rith Messenger, June 6, 1924, January 6, 1928, May 9, 1930; Hason, “The Sephardic Jews of Rhodes,” 248.

44. Ben Selling to David Bressler, Portland File, Industrial Removal Office Papers, American Jewish Historical Society; Ellen Eisenberg, “The Transplanted to the Rose City: The Creation of East European Jewish Community in Portland, Oregon,” Journal of American Ethnic History 19.3 (Spring 2000): 83–85.

45. Cone, Family of Strangers , 110, 120.

46. Scribe, October 15, 1920.

47. Mrs. Thornton Goldsby, “The History of the Seattle Section, National Council of Jewish Women, 1900–1927,” manuscript in Seattle Section, NCJW Papers, Research Library, University of Washington.

48. [Peixoto], “Relief Work of the Associated Charities”; Emanu-El, January 11, 1918. Professor Peixotto was the second woman to receive a doctorate from the University of California. See “Peixotto, Jessica Blanche,” in Hyman and Moore, Jewish Women in America, 1040.

49. Emanu-El, January 11, 1918; William Toll, “The Feminization of the Heroic: Ethel Feineman and Professional Nurture,” in Menachim Mor, ed., Crisis and Reaction: The Hero in Jewish History (Omaha, 1995), 202–10.

50. Scribe, October 15, November 26, 1920, February 21, 1921, March 31, 1922.

51. See Samuel C. Kohs, The Roots of Social Work (New York, 1966), 132–34.

52. B’nai B’rith Messenger, January 11, 1924, reported that the Jewish Committee for Personal Service, a statewide body headed by Rabbi Coffee, visited Jews in state prisons. There were then sixty-three Jews incarcerated at San Quentin, and thirty-three at Folsom. A report in the Scribe, June 1, 1928, noted that Jews were about 2 percent of California’s prison population, most being young men drifting through who broke the law. See also Fred Rosenbaum, Free to Choose: The Making of a Jewish Community in the American West, the Jews of Oakland, California from the Gold Rush to the Present Day (Berkeley, 1976), 91–93.

53. On Boris Bogin’s prominence at the Los Angeles Jewish Welfare Federation and as a key figure in the Community Chest, see B’nai B’rith Messenger, October 17, 1924.

54. Emanu-El, February 5, March 5, March 12, 1926.

55. B’nai B’rith Messenger, January 4, 1924; Emanu-El, January, 15, 1926.

56. Samuel Kohs to M. J. Karpf, July 16, 1927, Samuel Kohs Papers, Western Jewish History Center. The first regional conference of Jewish social service workers was held in 1928, see the Scribe, June 1, 1928. Scribe, August 3, 1928, notes that Kohs had assumed directorship of the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities.

57. Scribe, September 28, 1928.

58. Emanu-El, May 17, 1918, reports a “Julius Kahn Day” honoring the California congressman in New York city by two thousand master masons for pushing through the selective service bill; Hiram Johnson to Simon Lubin, August 20, 1912, September 13, 1913; Harry Miller (The Judeans of Oakland) to Lubin, May 29, 1914, Simon Lubin Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; David G. Dalin, “Jewish and Non-Partisan Republicanism in San Francisco, 1911–1963,” in Rischin, ed. Jews of the West, 110–17.

59. Scribe, February 24, 1922, carries a story on the new Macy’s Building at 34th and Broadway.

60. The apprenticeship at Wanamakersis explained in Harold Hirsch interview, typescript, undated, Jewish Historical Society of Oregon. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, 1986), 14–20, explains innovations in sales techniques. Images of Meier and Frank, Lipman Wolfe, Bullocks Wilshire and the May Department Store can be found on the World Wide Web at pdx.history.com.tripod.com; www.swlaw.edu/bullockswilshire; www.you-are-here.com/building

61. William Leach, Land of Desire, Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993), 20–35.

62. Zarchin, Glimpses of Jewish Life in San Francisco, 67; Rosenbaum, Free to Choose, 26–31.

63. Scribe, October 29, 1920; Emanu-El, February 24, 1928; B’nai B’rith Messenger, February 17, May 18, 1928.

64. Cone, Family of Strangers, 109.

65. Minute Book, Seattle Section, National Council of Jewish Women, January 13, 1916, Research Library, University of Washington.

66. Jonah Wise to Prince Lucien Campbell, December 8, 1915, Campbell to Wise, December 9, 1915, October 9, 1917, Wise to Campbell, May 19, 1919, Campbell to Wise, November 10, 1919, Wise to Campbell, September 23, 1920, Campbell to Wise, October 3, 1921, Karl Onthank to Mrs. Campbell, March 6, 1925, President’s Office Correspondence, University of Oregon Archives; Scribe, May 31, 1929.

67. Ellen Eisenberg, “From Cooperative Farming to Urban Leadership,” in Kahn, Jewish Life in the American West, 113–31.

68. Emanu-El, January 4, 1918.

69. B’nai B’rith Messenger, January 3, 1930; Seattle Jewish Transcript, January 3, 1930; Scribe, January 3, 1930.

70. B’nai B’rith Messenger, January 29, 1926.

71. B’nai B’rith Messenger, March 9, 1928.

72. Menuhin was the father of the violin virtuoso, Yehudi Menuhin. See Moshe Menuhin, “Jewish Communal Education in San Francisco in 1926,” in Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 21.2 (January 1989): 99.

73. The expansion of Jewish education in San Francisco from 1897 through 1920 under the auspices of the Jewish Education Society is noted in an untitled and undated typescript in Jacob Nieto Papers, American Jewish Archives; Emanu-El, May 3, 1918. See also Menuhin, “Jewish Communal Education,” 101–2.

74. Scribe, February 1, 1929.

75. “Beautiful Manifestations of Jewish Culture,” B’nai B’rith Messenger, March 30, 1928.

76. See Robert Adamic, “Los Angeles! There She Blows!” Outlook and Independent, August 13, 1930, 596; Joseph Lilly, “Metropolis of the West,” North American Review (September 1931), 244–45.

77. “Spokane,” Scribe, October 29, 1920; Emanu-El, February 24, 1928.

78. Many oral histories describe education. Bernhard Goldsmith sent his sons to Lawrenceville School near Princeton; Mark Gerstle went to law school at Harvard; daughters were usually educated at local private schools and by tutors. See “Bernhard Goldsmith Interview,” H. H. Bancroft Collection; Mark Gerstle memoirs, Alice Gerstle Levison interview, Lucile Hening Koshland interview, Bancroft Library.

79. Scribe, January 6, 1922: Jewish college students at Reed, 20; North Pacific Dental College, 8; University of Oregon Medical School, 6.

80. Scribe, November 4, December 9, December 16, 1927.

81. Scribe, April 19, 1929; The Oregana 1928, University of Oregon Yearbook (Eugene, 1928), 353, Division of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Library.

82. B’nai B’rith Messenger, January 27, 1928.

83. Sol Silverman, “Opportunities and Achievements of Jewish Students in the University,” Emanu-El, April 6, 1928.

84. Scribe, September 23, October 28, December 23, 1927. In 1929 Rabbi Goldstein took a pulpit in Alabama and was succeeded by Rabbi Max Merritt, who came from a Hillel post at in the University of Illinois. Scribe, July 19, 1929

85. Scribe, June 14, 1929.

86. Rose Pesotta, Bread Upon the Waters (Ithaca, 1987), 19, estimated 75 percent of the workers were Mexican women. The rest were Italians, Russian Jews, and Americans.

87. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metroplis, 154.

88. For temple locations see B’nai B’rith Messenger, January 6, 1928, 20–21.

89. Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood, Silent Film, and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, 1998), 3–7, argues that, because the early movies were viewed primarily by immigrant workers, attendance could transform lives as personal problems were dramatized on the silver screen.

90. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film Making in the Studio Era (New York, 1988), 4–11, 21–28, 60, 80; Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (Metuchen, NJ, 1988), 3–4, 9. The key role of the distribution of films in cementing the studio system is emphasized in Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 132. On land speculation see William C. DeMille, Hollywood Saga (New York, 1939), 87. For wage rates see Murray Ross, Stars and Strikes: Unionization of Hollywood (New York, 1935), 6–7. Leo B. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony; The Movie Makers (New York, 1941), 4, 107, estimates the studios in 1939 employed between 27,500 and 33,600 people each week producing films.

91. The social snobbery of the old Jewish elite is presented in Neil Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988), 275–77.

92. B’nai B’rith Messenger; March 26, April 2, 1926; June 15, 22, 1928; January 10, 24, February 7, 1930; Scribe, January 10, 1930.

93. B’nai B’rith Messenger, January 13, 1928; Charles Higham, Merchant of Dreams, Louis B Mayer, M.G.M., and the Secret of Hollywood (New York, 1994),78; Budd Shulberg, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince (New York, 1981), 191.

94. See the account of Rabbi Magnin’s triumphal appearance in Portland in B’nai B’rith Messinger, May 4, 1928.

95. Scribe, June 7, 1929; Emanu-El, February 10, March 16, 1928.

96. B’nai B’rith Messenger, October 17, 1924.

97. Louis Newman, “Telling It in Gath,” Scribe, November 11, 1927; Newman, “Editorial,” Scribe, December 23, 1927.

98. Scribe, November 9 and December 21, 1928.

99. See the editorial memorializing his death in a traffic accident in B’nai B’rith Messinger, October 3, 1930.

100. Issell and Cherny, San Francisco, 40–41.

101. Louis Newman, “Telling It in Gath,” Scribe, February 1, 1929.

102. “Meeting of the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco, Monday, March 31, 1930,” typescript in Nieto Papers, American Jewish Archives.

103. Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and Los Angeles (New York, 1994), 23–24.

104. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York, 1992), 124–25.

105. Jonathan Bowles, “The Empire Has No clothes,” Center for an Urban Future (February 2000): 3–4, 14–15, www.nycfuture.org/images_pdfs/pdfs/Empire%20No%20clothes%2000.pdf online.

106. Gary R. Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (Gainsville, 2005), 24, 128–38.

107. Bruce Phillips, “The Challenge of Family, Identity and Affiliation,” in Ava F. Kahn and Marc Dollinger, eds., California Jews (Hanover, 2002), 20–21.

108. Saba Soomekh, “Tehrangeles: Capital, Culture, and Faith Among Iranian Jews,” paper presented at Religious Pluralism in Southern California Conference, UC Santa Barbara (May 9, 2003), pdf available on internet at www.religion.ucsb.edu/projects/newpluralism/tehrangeles.doc.

109. Tom Tugend, “Rites Launch Israel Tolerance Museum,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, May 7, 2004; Bernard Weinraub, “Jewish History Museum Opening in Los Angeles,” New York Times, April 21, 1996; Naomi Pfefferman, “Skirbal at Five,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, April 13, 2001; Gene Lichtenstein, “L.A. Museums Saved by the Jews,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, August 16, 2002.

110. Joe Eskenazi, “Have Demographers Undercounted Jews in the West?” Jewish News Weekly, October 18, 20 02, www.jewish.com/content/20-/module/displaystory/story_id/1908/format/html/edition_id/386/displaystory.html. Bob Colacello, “Eli Broad’s Big Picture,” Vanity Fair (December 2006), 324–30, 379–86.

111. See Rob Eshman, “A Fistful of Scholars,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, December 2, 2005, www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=15043.