COMPARED TO EUROPE, THERE WAS RELATIVELY LITTLE ANTI-SEMITISM in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first signs of open anti-Semitism appeared during the Civil War. It was a time of economic slump, political unrest, and frayed tempers. Jews were accused of profiteering, smuggling, black-marketeering, and draft-dodging. On December 17, 1862, General Ulysses Grant issued Executive Order No. 11, expelling all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. President Abraham Lincoln countermanded it three days later, but Grant had made his position clear, although he would carry the Jewish vote in the 1868 election and name a number of Jews to high office.
In 1877 a Jewish banker Joseph Seligman was refused admission to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York. This signaled a new trend, excluding Jews (and blacks) from social contacts. This was true for resorts, social clubs, and private schools. The Protestant social elite saw the Jews as climbing too fast. They had to be kept in their place.
The rise of anti-Semitism came after the Great Migration from Russia. Stereotypes from religious, economic, political, and sociological prejudice ran rampant. Jews were seen as either clannish, international financiers or communists, greedy and cheap, and they were accused alternately of being too bookish, too aggressive, and also too withdrawn and introverted. For many, moreover, their greatest fault lay in the fact that they did not have classic W.A.S.P. good looks. Rather they were angular, with big noses. Opprobrium followed.
Eastern intellectuals like Henry Adams and Midwest farmer types like Ignatius Donnelly and carmaker Henry Ford saw the Jews as a symbol of their discontent. Among the reckless charges of the populist agitators was the one that the Jews controlled the banks. The Jewish bankers were taking the farmers’ land. The Jews favored the gold standard. It was just such irrational hatred that spurred the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924.
During the 1919–20 Red Scare, the deportation of Jewish radicals by A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover solidified the image of the Jew as the Antichrist. The Ku Klux Klan, citing Scripture, made Jews a target. So did outspoken anti-Semites such as radio preacher and Nazi sympathizer Father Charles Coughlin, America Firster and Holocaust denier Gerald L. K. Smith, and Mississippi senator and white supremacist Theodore Bilbo. Universities, including those in the Ivy League, kept strict quotas on Jews. A 1944 poll showed that 24 percent of Americans believed Jews to be a menace to American society.
Jewish children at school. Library of Congress
If there was one place that insulated Jews from anti-Semitism, it was the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn. For many Jewish Brooklynites, anti-Semitism was something talked about in the newspapers but rarely felt, because everyone in Brooklyn, it seemed, was Jewish. (In neighborhoods close to Italian and Irish communities, Jewish kids often heard “Christ-killer” taunts from other kids.) And while most of the Jews who had immigrated to Brooklyn were uneducated because of the persecution and anti-Semitism in Russia, and had unskilled jobs, many of the men had tailoring experience, which elevated them to semi-skilled status and allowed them to rise on the socioeconomic ladder. The immigrants with no skills at least had escaped the pogroms. Despite the poverty, they were making more than they had been making in Russia. Their goals were modest: to have something to eat, to save some money, and to send their children to college. To that end, their sons and daughters were expected to study hard and live more prosperous lives. Sons were pushed by parents, who recounted their travails in Russia, to take advantage of this land of opportunity to become doctors or lawyers, and daughters were indoctrinated to marry doctors or lawyers.
At the same time, a small percentage of immigrant daughters chose to become independent. These ambitious women themselves became doctors and lawyers in New York City, and they would become leaders in the union, women’s suffrage, and birth-control movements. These women limited the size of their families and made sure their daughters were as well educated as their sons.
Immigrants’ sons also rebelled, mostly against the Orthodoxy. Boys would sit outside the synagogues hatless. The fathers, dressed in black, entered the synagogue crying real tears. To the fathers, these boys were lost souls, “lost to God, the family, and to Israel of old.” As Lincoln Steffens observed, “Two thousand years of devotion, courage, and suffering for a cause were lost in a generation.”
Ira Glasser, who one day would be a leading protector of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights through his work with the ACLU, remembers growing up in an all-Jewish milieu. Christians were the odd ones. Growing up, he knew Protestants, but virtually all of them were black.
IRA GLASSER “I was born on April 18, 1938, at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. My dad was born on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. His father came shortly after the turn of the last century from Eastern Poland or Western Russia, depending on the borders of the last war, when he was ten years old. He didn’t speak English when he arrived, and left school early. My father didn’t complete the fifth grade. My grandfather was a construction worker, a glazier, which is where our name comes from. He was one of four or five brothers, and my father was one of four or five brothers, and every single one of them was in the glass business. I was the oldest son of the oldest son, and it was something of a family scandal when I announced at age five that I was not going into glass.
“My father wasn’t political. He was what I used to call a Vincent Impellitteri Democrat. He was a fierce union guy. Most of his working life he was an official of the glaziers’ union, and for many years he was head of New York City Local 1087. There was nothing radical about him. My father’s family read the Daily News and the Journal-American. I always thought growing up that he and most of the people in the construction union were racists. My father in his later years made a remarkable transformation. He worked with Ernie Green, one of the original Little Rock kids, who was then with the Department of Labor, to begin one of the first minority apprenticeship programs in the New York City construction unions. He was very proud of that. But it wasn’t political or ideological. He just believed in fairness, in giving people chances. But [when I was] growing up, there was none of that from him. I got most of my politics from my mother’s side of the family.
“My mother’s father was an early organizer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or the ILGWU. His politics weren’t radical, and he ended up with the Liberal Party, which in those days was an anti-Communist rival of the American Labor Party, and my father and he always used to argue, in a friendly but passionate way, about the best route to progress for the working man.
Ira Glasser and his father.
Courtesy of Ira Glasser
“My father was very American. He wasn’t religious. I don’t think he was bar mitzvahed. He never went to shul. All that came from my mother’s side. My father came out of a culture where there was strong-arming by the unions. He was a street guy. The story I heard about my paternal grandfather’s early days had to do with guns and knives and hoodlums—that’s what being an early organizer in the construction unions was often about. My father grew up in that milieu. He never spoke about it until he was in his eighties. To the day he died, at almost ninety, he carried around a blackjack in his car. He had had it since he was a young man. That was the kind of thing that outraged my mother. Her family, though also union activists, were more refined. My mother had a year of college, which was unusual for a woman. My father didn’t seem to value education or culture. There was always tension around those differences. My mother’s family liked my father, but I think they wondered who this guy was. My father never said three words to me until I was married. He was never mean to us, but it was awkward and difficult for him to relate to children. We never had a serious conversation until I was an adult and he knew who I was. The notion of me talking to my father was literally unthinkable. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. It wouldn’t have occurred to him. My mother, like many Jewish mothers, couldn’t relate to you unless you were a child.
“At home we read P.M., a left-wing newspaper, much farther to the left than the New York Post during the Jim Wechsler years. In order to maintain its independence, it took no advertising, which is why it finally went out of business in 1947 or 1948. Its editor in chief was Ralph Ingersoll, and during the years I was reading it, among the writers were Max Lerner, Murray Kempton, Wechsler, and I. F. Stone. This was as close to a serious, left-wing mass-circulation paper as there has ever been in New York, and it was a paper a lot of liberal Jews read.
Ira Glasser and his mother. Courtesy of Ira Glasser
“My maternal grandmother came from Russia, of course. Her husband came from Warsaw. She came over when she was twelve or thirteen, the oldest daughter of a family of seven kids. Her father came over first, got a job, and then she came over with the older kids, and then the mother came with the infants. So my grandmother was thirteen when she made that three-month journey of train and boats and steerage, arriving here in 1905. She lived two blocks from where I grew up in East Flatbush, and when I was eight, she was always terrified I would be crossing the intersection of Remsen Avenue, Linden Boulevard, and Kings Highway by myself. I used to tell her, ‘You crossed half the world by yourself when you were my age.’ She’d say, ‘Yeah, but there was less traffic.’
“My grandfather on my mother’s side was as close to a socialist as there was in my family. He was a liberal Democrat, and the argument in the household would be between the Liberal Party he liked and the Democratic candidate my father supported. The story I had heard was that my grandfather was a cantor, very religious and very smart, had a great tenor voice, and he was one of the few Jews who got into the gymnasium [Polish high school] and was going to school. When he came here at age sixteen, he had to give up the educational track he was on, and he ended up working in the garment industry. He was one of the early union organizers with David Dubinsky, on those picket lines in the early days of the ILGWU. He spent his whole life as a union official.
“I lived on East 95th Street between Church Avenue and Willmohr Street. I suspect it is virtually unchanged, but Haitian or Dominican now. [That stretch of Church Avenue is also known as Bob Marley Boulevard.] At one point, the old shul was a Pentecostal church. Most of the buildings were four-family, two-story brick structures.
“My world was my block. When I walked from 95th Street to 93rd Street, where my grandparents lived, it was scary and ominous, because there were kids you didn’t know. I used to joke you needed a passport to go to 94th Street. We’re talking one block. It was scary, because what if you met some kids you didn’t know? And these were Jewish kids. There were Catholic neighborhoods where people were Jew-haters and called you Christ-killers, but none of that ever happened to me. It was a totally Jewish area. I used to say, ‘If I started from the stoop in front of my house and walked as far as I could walk in a day in any direction, I would never find anyone who wasn’t white and Jewish.’
“There was one Christian family next door. A woman and her brother. I remember what an oddity they were. [Whispering] ‘They’re Christian.’ I was supposedly growing up in this urbane and sophisticated New York City, but in reality, the way I grew up and most people grew up, it was the most parochial experience imaginable. I didn’t learn that Jews and Catholics weren’t the majority in this country until I was twenty-one and going to graduate school in Ohio. I remember asking, ‘Who is the majority?’ ‘The Protestants.’ I knew there were Protestants, but they were black. I knew that once a summer white Protestants went to some sort of gathering at Yankee Stadium, but I never saw them. Ironically, I ended up marrying a white Protestant, which was a very big thing for a Jewish boy to do in 1959. She always regarded herself as a minority, because she was. Even the Hasidic Jews I saw once in a while seemed weird and alien and other. The only blacks I ever saw, once in a while, was a janitor or a cleaning woman. I remember the first time I saw a black person. I was walking on my block with my mother. I couldn’t have been more than five or six. A very dark-skinned man came walking over. He was delivering coal, and I was startled in the same way I was startled the first time I saw somebody on crutches or with cerebral palsy or in a wheelchair.
“I said to my mother, ‘What is that?’ Not who is that. And my mother was just totally matter-of-fact about it. She was passionate about these issues in a way my father was not. She said, ‘Oh well, some people have different skin color the way some people have different eye color or hair color.’
“It was an astonishing moment. This was in 1943. I couldn’t have been more than five, and it was not just the content of what she said but the matter-of-factness, because very often when liberal parents try to respond to questions like that, they are so anxious to impose a nonracial view on this kid, it becomes something important, like teaching the catechism. The elevation of their tone of urgency communicates more to the kids than the content of what they are saying. She’s saying this is nothing, but her tone makes it sound like it’s a very big deal.
“But my mother was very matter-of-fact about it. The whole idea of skin color being like eye color and having a kid perceive it that way was significant, that color was not connected in any important way to issues of character or intelligence or anything like that.
“In school many of the teachers were Irish Catholic. In the first grade I had a light-skinned black teacher named Mrs. Bush. That was very unusual. There were virtually no black teachers in the New York City public schools in those years, and there weren’t many Jewish teachers either. The wave of the dominance of Jewish teachers in New York City didn’t happen until a decade later.
“We were Orthodox. There was no Conservative or Reform. My mother kept a kosher house more out of respect for her parents than out of belief. I grew up with two sets of dishes, two sets of utensils—four sets, actually, because there were two separate sets for Passover. There was this transformation, like moving, where everything was cleared out and brought up from the basement for ten days, and then everything was brought back down. To this day, there are certain patterns of dishes, if I see them in an antique store I associate [them] with milk and not meat.
“All these memories have a Proustian quality. I never remember a time when I thought any of that made any sense. I just grew up that way. Just as apostate Catholics still have warm feelings about Christmas trees, I remember the Purim and Passover holidays with nothing but fondness and wistfulness and nostalgia and warmth, but I never remember a time when I had a belief system that supported it.
“They sent me to Hebrew school four days a week. I’d come home from school at three thirty, and Hebrew school went from four thirty to six thirty, and when you got home it was cold and dark. I used to play hookey a lot, because otherwise I would never play ball, which was my passion. I had to figure out how to deal with the truancy notices my mother would get from Hebrew school. I learned how to pick the mailbox lock and intercept them so she would never see them. But I also remember being impressed with the ridiculousness of the fact I was spending eight hours a week in Hebrew school, and they never taught me the language. They taught me to read phonetically. To this day I can open a Hebrew book and read it phonetically. Years later I used to say, ‘They tested you in your reading of the sidur in Hebrew the same way they tested typists, which is to say they gave you two minutes with a stopwatch, and you read as many words as you could, and they subtracted the number of pronunciation mistakes you made from the number of words you read. Which was exactly how they tested typists. But I always marveled that you never knew what any of it meant. They never tried to teach you that, and it wasn’t until years later that I realized it was intentional. They were training you to take your place in a ceremony with ritual. They were training you to attend shul, to take your place and be familiar with the service.
“Another thing I remember about shul: the women were always upstairs, and the boys, who were special, were downstairs. The genders were totally segregated, and that reinforced the gender roles, so you never came to see gender in the same way you were taught to see race. Which is why a lot of Jewish liberal men were more reflexively good on racial issues in the 1970s than they were on gender issues. Because they were raised with differential religious roles, they were slower to come to the gender-equality issues. I was the son who was going to go to college, and my sister was the daughter who would hopefully marry well. My struggles with ‘What should I major in? Where should I go? What should I be?’ were taken seriously. Nobody took that seriously with my sister. She went to college, but it was more like a finishing school. And all of that was derivative of the fact that the role differentiation was very rigid and very much reinforced by religion, and the way they taught you to take your place in the ritual. It was approximately the same thing the Catholics used to do with Latin. You learned Latin as part of the liturgy, but for me I found that distressingly meaningless. I went to junior high school at PS 252 in the neighborhood for about a year, and I was headed toward Tilden High School, when my parents in 1950 bought a house as part of that postwar-affluence move to the suburbs. That was the American Dream. They were going to buy a house in the country. Your own fence. Your own home. They moved me against my will, to my bitter objection, to what they told me was Long Island, but which I later discovered was Queens.
Courtesy of Ira Glasser
“In 1950 we moved to the town of Laurelton, Queens, near the border of Nassau County. For the first time in my life we were among the first wave of postwar Jewish families moving to a suburb which was not dominantly Jewish. There were still no blacks, but I’d go to school, and I would play basketball, football, softball with Italian kids and Episcopalians and Lutherans, which I hadn’t known existed. We moved when I was twelve, and I lived there through [graduating from] Queens College when I was twenty-one. During all those teenage years the social segregation within an entirely white community was extraordinary. I went to school with all these other people, Irish and Italian, Catholics and different kinds of Protestant faiths, and you were in class every day, and it was very cordial. I would spend entire weekends from dawn to dusk with these guys playing ball. They were my friends. But it wasn’t until years later that I realized that although I played ball with Bob Laino and a kid named Ganzer and Bob Phleiger, who was Lutheran, never once after the game broke up did I go back to their homes, or they to mine. I have no idea where those guys lived. You always went back with a Jewish kid. I never dated nor did I know any Jew who dated a girl who wasn’t Jewish. So there was ethnic and religious segregation within the apparently integrated community. Years later, when I was a different person, I remembered back: Oh my God, that was astonishing. It was never talked about. I’d sit on my porch with my Jewish friends, all Roosevelt Democrats—we all hated Joe McCarthy—and we were all good on race, although none of us had ever confronted it. We were nearly all Dodger fans. But we never once talked about how strange it was that we never went back to Bob Laino’s house, that we didn’t even know where he lived. We were guys who discussed everything, and we never discussed that. During my teenage years we spent hours talking about politics and philosophy, and what we were going to be and how we were going to change the world. We were social talkers and political talkers, but it never occurred to us.”