JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---Episode 13

MANY STUDENTS WENT TO THE BIG THREE TO PARTY AND TO SOCIALIZE WITH "THEIR KIND" 

    Despite their growing prominence, however, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton faced serious problems. Yale had become the archetype of the elite private college through the immense popularity of Frank Merriwell and later of Dink Stover [ the hero of Owen Johnson's 1912 novel, Stover at Yale ], but deteriorating academic standards were a subject of intense internal discussion. So, too, was the alleged decline in standards of deportment --- a significant issue for an institution that prided itself on turning out "gentlemen." According to the George W. Pierson, "Disorders, infractions, and petty irritations had been getting rather frequent and unnecessary." By 1902, "an unending stream of individuals had to be disciplined for cheating, or for drunken disorder, or for throwing bottles out the windows,  or even for going sailing with low women." 
   In1903, a committee headed by Professor Irving Fisher issued a devastating report about the academic atmosphere at Yale. Scholarly performance, the report concluded, had been dropping regularly since1896--1897, with the decline most marked among the highest-ranking students. The value system underpinning campus culture, which elevated social, athletic, and fraternal activities over scholarship, was at  the root of the problem: "An impression is very strong and very prevalent that the athlete is working for Yale, the student for himself.  To be a high-stand man is now a disadvantage rather than otherwise . . . In fact, hard study has become UNFASHIONABLE at Yale." 

   "In general," the report went on, "the man who attends strictly to study [ the 'grind'] is regarded as peculiar or even contemptible. It is believed that a man should 'know mwn' at Yale ; that 'study is a mistake'." To support its sobering conclusions, the report offered an intriguing fact : whereas 26 of 34 of Yale's valedictorians had been tapped by one of Yale's prestigious senior societies between 1861 and 1894, only 3 of 9 had been tapped since.
   So anti-intellectual was the undergraduate culture at Yale that classes vied with one another for the honor of being the least studious. In 1904, the yearbook boasted of having "more gentlemen and fewer scholars than any other class in the memory of man." But the class of 1905, judged by the Fisher Committee to have been the worst in recent Yale history, bested its predecessor, offering the following ditty : 

     Never since the Heavenly Host with all the Titans fought 
        Saw they a class whose scholarship 
    Approached so close to naught. 

Meanwhile, the Yale senior societies continued to select their members on the basis of athletic talent, prominence in extracurricular affairs, and social background. And so great a public honor was election to a society that the question of who was [and who was not] "tapped" on Tap Day was the subject of regular coverage in the New York Times.

If intellect was not highly valued at turn-of-the-century Yale, it was perhaps even less esteemed at Princeton. Headed since 1888 by Francis Landley Patton, a Presbyterian theologian noted for his administrative laxity and his failure to enforce disciplinary and academic standards, Princeton had a reputation as the least academically serious member of the Big Three. Patton himself hardly helped matters when he reportedly said at a faculty meeting : "Gentlemen, whether we like it or not, we shall have to recognize that Princetonis a rich man's college and that rich men do not frequently come to college to study." Patton also made a remark that was to haunt Old Nassau's reputation for years to come : Princeton was "the finest country club in America." 

   So weak was Princeton's academic atmosphere that a faculty committee was formed in 1901 to investigate "the scholastic condition of the college." Patton vigorously opposed its recommendation to raise academic standards, and by March 1902 a group  of trustees began to look into the matter. It became clear that Patton's end was near when, at a dinner at the Waldorf in New York, men from Harvard, Columbia, and Hopkins told several trustees in blunt terms that "Princeton was becoming the laughing stock of the academic world, that the President was neglecting his duty, the professors neglecting theirs, the students theirs, that Princeton was going to pieces." In a matter of weeks, Patton had been forced to resign, and Woodrow Wilson, an eminent political scientist who had been on the faculty since 1890, was named president. Wilson spent much of the next eight years trying to raise his school's academic standards. 
   Though Harvard was by far the most academically distinguished of the Big Three, it too suffered from a student culture largely hostile to academic exertion. As at Yale and Princeton, a faculty committee was formed at Harvard to identify the sources of low academic standards and to devise policies for elevating them. The committee, which was chaired by Le Baron Russell Briggs and included Harvard's future president A. Lawrence Lowell, concluded that the amount of time that students spent studying was "discreditably small." Its analysis of replies of letters ofinquiry from 245 instructors and 1,757 students revealed a surprising fact : the instructors believed that students spent twice as much time on their studies as they actually did. Even the better students were devoting only about 25 hours a week to academic work, including the 12 hours spent at lectures; the less committed students spent considerably less time on academic tasks. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 12

 HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE U.S.A. BETWEEN  1800 AND
 WORLD WAR II ---- THE "JEWISH PROBLEM"  

   When the Association of New England Deans convened to consider the "Jewish problem" in the spring of 1918, it did so amid a rising wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. During the decade before America's entry into World War I in 1917, concerns hsd been growing about the unprecedented wave of immigrants pouring into the United States----a torrent that peaked at over 1.2 million in1914, when the war in Europe temporarily stemmed the flow. But the American decision to join the British and French in their battle against Germany gave new fuel to nativist sentiment, for it led to an obsession with "100 percent Americanism"---an obsession that cast a suspicious eye toward all Americans not of "Anglo-Saxon" origin. 
   In June 1917, just two months after Congress declared war, it passed the Espionage Act, which provided penalties of up to twenty years in prison for those who demonstrated, spoke, or wrote against the war. It was followed in May 1918 by the even more draconian Sedition Act, which, in the words of Eric Foner, "criminalized spoken or printed statements intended to cast 'contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute' on the 'form of government' or that advocated interference with the war effort." Though Eugene Debs, the Indiana-born leader of the American Socialist Party, was sentenced to ten years in prison under these statutes, immigrants bore the brunt of the repression. Thousands of "enemy aliens" were arrested in 1918, and numerous foreign-language newspapers were banned from the mails. 
   But anti-immigrant sentiment had been rising even before the Wilson administration decided to enter the GreT War. In 1911, the famous Dillingham Commission [chaired by the Republican senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont] issued its 42-volume report, giving the restriction forces a legitimacy they had previously lacked. Among the many contributions of the Dillingham Report to the nativist cause was its seemingly scientific documentation of the inferiority of the heavily Catholic and Jewish immigrants of southern and eastern Europe compared to their sturdier, more industrious, and predominantly Protestant "Teutonic" predecessors from Britain, Scandinavia, Holland, and Germany. 
   Yet it was not until February 1917 --- two months before America entered the war---that the restrictionists had their first their first legislative victory. Overriding Woodrow Wilson's presidential veto, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which imposed a literacy requirement on immigrants for the first time in American history. Though ostensibly a neutral act targeted at individuals, the legislation in fact applied the principle of group exclusion to European immigrants --- a status previously reserved to nonwhites. The real purpose of the act was to cut the number of "new" immigrants from eastern and southern Europe --- a point confirmed by Senator William P. Dillingham, the bill's chief architect, who acknowledged that he had endorsed the literacy test only after learning that it would reduce "new: immigrants by 30 percent while not cutting the flow of "old" immigrants at all. When the bill passed on February 5, 1917, the patrician members of the Immigration Restriction League, which had been founded by three Harvard-educated Boston Brahmins in 1894, were so pleased that they held a quiet celebration dinner in Boston's exclusive Union Club. 

SOCIAL UPHEAVAL AND THE RISE OF ANTI-SEMITISM

   Of all the immigrant groups streaming into the United States, none aroused greater antipathy than the Jews of eastern Europe. As early as 1913 William Barclay Parsons, a Columbia University trustee who was one of the early leaders of the movement to limit the number of Jews in elite private colleges, wrote of them :"In character they are terribly persistent. They realize that there has been for 2000 years or more a prejudice against  them, and they are always seeking after special privileges for themselves and their people. . . They form the worst type of our emigrants, they supply the leaders to anarchistic, socialist, and other movements of unrest. In the recent election the socialistic vote was confined largely to the East Side and to Brownsville, where they live." A year later, Parson's fears were seemingly confirmed when the Jews of New York City's Lower East Side elected Meyer London, the Socialist Party candidate, to Congress. 
   Among the most conspicuous public opponents of America's entry into the war was Victor Berger, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish congressman from Milwaukee, then one of the nation's socialist strongholds. Unlike Meyer London, who had reluctantly gone along with American intervention, Berger militantly opposed the war and was sentenced to twenty years in prison under the Sedition Act. Reelected to Congress while headed to jail, he was barred from his seat by his Congressional colleagues. Percy E. Quin of Mississippi [Democrat] called Berger "a more dangerous character. . . within the United States" than any other person and condemned the "colony of Germans . . . in Milwaukee" for reelecting "that enemy of the Government to the Congress." 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II ---- Episdoe 11

  CONTINUING WITH THE GROWING-UP YEARS OF I.I. 
  RABI IN THE GHETTO COMMUNITY OF BROWNSVILLE
  IN BROOKLYN 
             [ Yesterday we discussed 10-year-old Rabi discovering the 
              Carnegie Library in Brooklyn and reading about
             Copernicus and then coming home and announcing to his
            Orthodox Jewish parents : "Who needs God?" ]


   Rabi's experiences and reading expanded his horizons beyond the religious system by which his life had been ordered.  Whether hr sensed a void that needed filling is open to question. The fact remains, however, that at this time Rabi became interested in another system of thought. As one writer has proclaimed, "three groups of influences are at work on the boy in the ghetto -----the orthodox Jewish, the American, and the Socialist. " Furthermore, as another writer has described, "the East Side and Brownsville . . . seething with social protest. Radicals, social reformers, and all kinds of champions were trying to make the masses cognizant of the deplorable conditions under which they lived."
   In this "seething" environment, Rabi happened upon Jack London's The Iron Heel. This novel, written in 1907, is a futuristic story set in the 1930s. It dramatically depicts the injustices heaped upon the people of the working class. Moreover, the tenets of socialism are clearly set forth by the story's main character Ernest Everhard, a heroic figure of persuasive knowledge and self-confidence : he explicitly elaborates Karl Marx's theory of surplus value and the materialistic view of history. This book made a powerful impression on young Rabi, and socialism seemed to offer the all-embracing ideas he found so appealing. "I became very interested in it, for about two years. I used to go to the local Socialist Club most every night. . . Among these Socialists, so very symptomatically , never did anybody address a word to me in the two years I went there."Rabi tried to convert to socialism other students as well as his teachers. His last elementary school-teacher, a Mr. Howell, was particularly patient with the new disciple of Marxism. 
   "He brought his lunch to the school, and I brought mine. We would sit there, and he would ask me questions, a whole series of questions : What would I do under socialism in this circumstance ? In that circumstance ? I would very glibly answer all his questions and very confidently." By the end of the school year Mr. Howell's questions had damened Rabi's enthusiasm for socialism : "I can see how big-hearted Mr. Howell was, because I must have been a pretty nasty and self-confident kid, a snotty kid." 
   
   When Rabi entered high school, he took note of his classmates and said to himself , "These people could never run a country." The socialist ideas became discredited in his thinking and he dropped them from his thoughts. 
   Although his advocacy of socialism as a system to live by came to an end, the influence of some of its ideas continued. For example, he found that the materialistic interpretation of history brought organization and simplicity to his study of history : "It doesn't matter if it's wrong. It's a system, it's a more or less logical thing . . . It was great."
   Many years later, Rabi reflected on this period of his life and on the influences of both religion and socialism : 

     There's the religious point of view that is universal in its way. If you revolt against religion, where you have nothing, you become an atheist ---whatever that means. For me there was this other system which was universal in its way : Marxism. Although erroneous in some respects, it was something and it was positive. There was this faith that human intellect and human effort formed the basis of what humans could do. What Marxism gives you is a view of society and a view of history ---an integrated view.  It's partially wrong, but it's a view. You get the habit from this of thinking of things in a holistic way. You see connections. 
   That was a hell of a big note for a kid of thirteen, fourteen, but I had the advantage of a religious background. Religion is also a system that encompasses everything, but it has something that Marxism doesn't have : religion has color and class. The whole idea of God, that's real class. 

While he was reading London and other socialist writers, Rabi was also reading books from the science shelves of the Carnegie Library. For a while he thought of becoming an astronomer, although neither he nor his father had any idea how an astronomer made a living. He discovered electricity and also he could build electrical devices and do experiments. From magazines published by the late Hugo Gernsback --including the Electrical Importing Company and Modern Electrics --- Rabi learned about radio transmitters and receivers. Soon he was immersed in telegraphy ; and, as sister Gertrude remembers : "Mother's wall in the living room was a radio station and his friends came in and out." Of these activities, Rabi has said :"Whatever I was interested in I could generally get a group to be interested in as well . . . I got some kids together . . . and we strung a telegraph line over two streets . . . I met this kid whose father had a junk shop and he had wire, you know, spools of wire that he thought was junk." By means of stones thrown from roof to roof, wire was stretched through the neighborhood and a telegraph station was set up. Rabi learned Morse code and he got a license. 
   With the exception of the earphones, Rabi built all the other components of his station : tuner, transmitter, spark coil, and coupler. He also designed a condenser to store electrical energy. His design was sufficiently novel that Hugo Gernsback paid him two dollars for a manuscript describing his design. While he was still in elementary school, Rabi's first scientific paper was published in Modern Electrics. 

   A thirteen-year-old Jewish boy is expected to celebrate his arrival at the age of responsibility with a bar mitzvah ceremony in the synagogue. On the Sabbath nearest his birthday, he is called to witness the reading of a biblical passage and delivers a talk basedon the Torah. Afterward, his parents provide a festive meal for relatives and friends. 
   But Rabi, this "formidable kid," would have none of it. 

     At that time, age thirteen, I was far advanced. I had read extensively and certainly knew about Copernicus. . . and I knew about electricity. The whole Jewish thing, as it appeared to me, began to look like superstition. . . So to get up there and take all that trouble to read something in the synagogue. I just wasn't going to do it. 

   What could his parents do ? They must have felt badly, but I wasn't so concerned. I was more concerned with the truth, revealed truth. I was a bastard of a kid not to worry about them. I look back now and I consider the sorrows I brought on them, it horrifies me. I wasn't self-righteous about it. I just couldn't figure out how they could miss these things I knew, they were so beautiful. 

In the end, a compromise was reached, and David Rabi's son ahd a bar mitzvah---but on his own terms. In the annals of this ceremony, Rabi's bar mitzvah was, in all probability, unique :

     They had a party at my bar mitzvah, and they brought in some people. They prevailed on me to make a speech, so I made a speech [in Yiddish] . My speech was "How the Electric Light Works," which which I described in great detail. I talked about the carbon filament, and then there was something I thought was very clever : getting the lead out from the filament. 

Rabi's bar mitzvah was not held in the synagogue, but at his home before what he regarded as ancient bearded men. 

   As high school approached, Rabi's parents suggested that he go into Hebrew studies at a yeshiva. Predictably, Rabi refused. And, predictably, it was he who decided where he would go to high school. 
   Boys High was, at that time, the school where all of the smart Jewish boys went. At Boys High he could match wits with some of the best. Boys High was the obvious choice, but Rabi elected Manual Training High School in Brooklyn, which, as its name implies, emphasized manual training. He had four years of crafts such as carpentry, machine shop, foundry work, and printing. Since the school was three miles from home, and he was to spend four years avoiding street gangs as he walked through one hostile territory after another on his way to and from school, his choice was clearly not based on convenience : "I went there purposely. I had been raised in an environment where we didn't see anything but Jews. . . I wanted to get away from that. I had very definite notions of being an American in a broader sense. I had read a great deal of history and I wanted to be a part of the greater thing ; so I went to Manual Training where there were almost no Jews." 

   When Rabi graduated from Manual Training High School in 1916, he was streetwise and self-educated. In the fall of 1916, he enrolled in college at Cornell. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 10

           Continuing With the Saga of the Rabi Family in the Ghetto
       Community of Brownsville in Brooklyn 


   In Brownsville, the Rabis lived as before, amid a mass of humanity living with equal frugality. "I didn't know we were poor," Rabi said later ---as did his sister Gertrude, but more revealingly : "There was poverty all around us, but I was very rich. My life was a joy." Rabi remembers being "a close family. We were completely open and we trusted one another. In the grocery store, the money drawer was open, and I could take what I wanted. That's something which I didn't abuse. When there were discussions of the family business, I was part of the discussions , maybe too much a part." 
   As for education, Rabi was not inspired by school :"I did well in school but I was no prodigy. Neither did I do any work. I went to class and listened." Inspiration came elsewhere.  One day he noticed one of his classmates carrying a strange book that did not come from the school. Rabi had read all the Yiddish books at home; he knew the Bible stories by heart. A strange book whetted his desire to know its contents. When he asked where the book came from, his classmate replied, "the library," and thus Rabi was introduced to the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Carnegie Library." 
   Here there were more books in one place than Rabi had ever seen. Starting with the A's, with Alcott, he took two books from the shelf and checked them out. But the librarian, suspicious of this small boy, stopped him before he got out of th building and made his read aloud  from one of the books before she would permit him to leave with them. Rabi read for her and then went home with his books. The year was 1908. [Rabi was 10]. 
   The children's books in the Carnegie Library were fun to read, and Rabi read them all. The next bank of shelves held books of science, which were organized by subject rather than by author. Again, he started with A for astronomy. Decades later, he could say : "That was what determined my later life more than anything else ---reading a little book on astronomy." 
   The young Rabi was captivated by astronomy --- but not by the usual things that might attract a ten-year-old, such as stars, interstellar distances, galactic sizes, intergalactic distances, or the constellations, or Jupiter's spot and Saturn's rings, or even the craters on the moon. The pages in the little astronomy book that so fixed Rabi's attention described the Copernican solar system. 
    Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, stirred the world when, in 1543,  he published his treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.  Up to that time, an earth-centered universe had been consistent with the wisdom of the past, with the teachings of biblical scholars, and, most of all, with everyone's common sense. It seemed obvious that the sun rose in the east, circled the earth, and set in the west : nothing indicated that the earth was spinning about a terrestrial axis. A few astronomers, however, like Kepler, like Galileo, saw beyond authorities of the past and were able to ignore the "certainties" of common sense. 
   Rabi was neither Kepler nor Galileo, but he saw what the Copernican system offered and his mind was receptive to it. His fascination with the biblical creation story, his reading and rereading of it, had raised questions in his mind. The answers he had been given invoked God at every turn : God raised the sun every morning ; God darkened the sky each night ; God brought the moon to the sky at different times in different shapes. 
   In the seventeenth century, the astronomer Johannes Kepler had seen the Copernican system as "an inexhaustible treasure of truly divine insight into the wonderful order of the world and all the bodies therein"---- a "wonderful order" also apparent to the child Rabi. "It was so beautiful, so marvelous," said Rabi years later,"so simple. Instead of the idea that there is some special intervention every day for the sun to come up. I came home with this great revelation." 
   One night after reading the astronomy book in the library, Rabi went home "full of delight," walked in, and announced to his parents, "It's all very simple, who needs God ?" 
   Who needs God ? Such a question for immigrant parents whose life was simple devotion to God and to their children : "I didn't appreciate what a  blow this this was. Gave them a lot of pain. I was sorry about it, perhaps baffled that they didn't share my enthusiasm. I have guilt feelings about their feelings. For my family it was rather tragic : I was the first born, the only son. And I could outtalk them." 
   Who needs God ? The immediate stimulus for the question was Rabi's delight and enthusiasm at the Copernican view of the heavens : this question, however, had been in the making during months of open-eyed observations --- and testing Jewish law held that one was not to ride a streetcar on the Sabbath. What if he did ? One Sabbath he tried it. He rode the streetcar, half expecting God to wreak havoc on both himself and the streetcar. He waited. No catastrophe occurred. Later he conducted another test :"I remember being in the synagogue and the priests, the Kohens would stand up with their hands outstretched and covered with tallis, they would bless the congregation. You were not supposed to look at their hands, you might go blind if you did. Well, I tried .. . with one eye." Since he was not struck blind by his defiant act, his doubts grew about the validity of things he had been taught. 
   Life conducted according to Jewish law brings dilemmas, moral dilemmas. One such arose in Brownsville : 

     Of course, you couldn't carry money on the Sabbath. I did once. I bought some candy. It was spectacular. I found I HAD some money in my pocket. I didn't put it there. I don't know how it got there, but there it was. And what to do ? I consulted with the other kids, what to do ? Well, apparently, you get rid of it. So I spent it and bought some candy. Later the storekeeper told my father and there was hell to pay. Here was a real moral question which I felt I was never resolved. They didn't understand the problem I was confronted with. I had the money in my pocket, what am I to do ? Go around with it ? Whether the sin was having the money in your pocket and walking around with it, or utilizing it ----- it was all kind of subtle. 
   
    There was nothing subtle about the Copernican sun. When Rabi discovered Copernicus in Brooklyn, his life outsde the home became increasingly secular as he slowly abandoned the religious practices and rituals of his parents. And they were no match for him : 

     You have no idea how tough I was. My father was a nice gentle man from another culture, another language . . . I was very hard on him. They [my parents] never spoke English well, not well enough to communicate any subtleties, so there was an enormous gap --- a generation gap and, in addition, a cultural gap. They were simple people. My mother was a woman of great intelligence, but very little education. That's true of my father as well. So I was left to myself because of the difficulty of bridging that gap. I would say now that I was rather insensitive to them. . . I was the first born, the only son. 
   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---- Episode 9

    CONTINUING WITH LIFE STORY OF I. I. RABI, NOBEL PRIZE--WINNING PHYSICIST, WHO GREW UP DIRT POOR AND  JEWISH IN MANHATTAN & BROOKLYN IN THE FIRST PART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

    Home to the Rabis was a tiny, two-room flat, one room serving as kitchen, dining room, and living room ; and the other a windowless bedroom, barely large enough for a bed. The toilet in the back yard was shared by other occupants of the building. In these two rooms lived six people : David and Sheindel Rabi ; Isidor and his little sister Gertrude ; and two boarders. Rabi could never remember where and how, in those cramped quarters, they all slept. 
   Home was in a slum---a Jewish ghetto. The streets teemed with activity. There were kids, kids, and more kids. "The streets were ours," wrote Irving Howe. "Everyplace else --- home, school, shop --- belonged to the grownups. But the streets belonged to us." There were gangs of Jewish boys, tough boys who roamed the streets and terrorized those who could, and would, be frightened. It took ingenuity to survive; and Rabi, though small for his age, made use of a special gift : he could tell stories. He so fascinated the bullying big boys with Bible stories that he became their mascot. 

   The neighborhood was a typical slum : "There were lots of prostitutes and saloons. Every intersection had three or four saloons. . . And there lots of synagogues." Synagogues and saloons : contradictory symbols of life in the ghetto of the Lower East Side. Young Rabi could, on the one hand, witness pious and devoted allegiance to religious life and, on the other, observe flagrant disregard of law. In their two-room flat, Rabi and Gertrude were thrust into the mature world of adult conversation. "We had relatives coming to our house who expressed different political ideas," Gertrude has said. Rabi listened and learned. And he read. 

   Of all the Bible stories, one held a special and unique appeal --- the Creation story : "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. " Rabi felt that here was something to explore, to understand, and, yes, to question : "The first verses of Genesis were very moving to me as a kid. The whole idea of the Creation --- the mystery and the philosophy of it. It sank in on me, and it's something I still feel."

   Although later he would forgo the practices and the rituals of Orthodox Judaism,  basic elements of that religious tradition remain the essence of humankind : "There's no question that basically, somewhere way down, I'm an Orthodox Jew. In fact, to this very day, if you ask for my religion, I say 'Orthodox Hebrew' --- in the sense that the church I'm not attending is that one. If I were to go to church, that's the one I would go to. That's the one I failed. It doesn't mean I'm something else." And with a conviction that has been tested by his training as a scientist, and that has endured his active participation in some of the most noteworthy events of the twentieth century, Rabi could say up until his lips were sealed by death in 1988, "My early upbringing, so struck by God, the maker of the world, this has stayed with me."
In 1907, David Rabi moved his family to Brownsville, a community in Brooklyn. [Best keep yo honky ass out of this hood.] Brownsville, in 1907, was like the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but with a difference. Each was the site of large Jewish populations, whose character was essentially the same. Both communities brought together recent immigrants who had in common their religious faith and their POVERTY.  Brownsville differed from the Lower East Side in being rural : there were chickens and goats in the streets, and the streets themselves were mud when it rained and dust when the sun beat down. Milk could be bought directly from a farmer. Brownsville was, in essence, the Lower East Side with dirt roads and nanny goats. The Rabis were fortunate : they had a nice yard behind their house and, for two years, Rabi was an avid gardener. 
   The move from Manhattan to Brooklyn was motivated by economics. Since the first little grocery store in the Lower East Side was not bringing in enough money, David Rabi opened a new store in Brownsville. The family lived in three rooms behind their store. When, at the age of nine, Rabi began to take a more active part in the operation of the store, it became, even more than before, a family operation. After school and on school holidays, he would deliver groceries around the neighborhood. And he would listen. "My father had very little to say and my mother was not very talkative, but for some reason the store became the neighborhood meeting place. Families would congregate there, and the conversation---on a wide range of subjects --- was very lively. This is how things were." 
   


   


   

    

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---Episode 8

                     I. I. RABI COMES TO NEW YORK CITY AT AGE 
                     TWO FROM EASTERN EUROPE 

   When the Rabi family settled in 1900 in New York City, it was not in the Upper West Side alongside wealthy German Jews , but the Lower East Side of Manhattan which, back then, was almost totally dirt-poor Jewish. The city blocks were subdivided  into cultural enclaves with Jews from the same parts of Europe banding together. The Rabis lived at 91 Willett Street in the midst of other Jews from Galicia, while David Rabi belonged to the society of Rymanower Young Men. 
   Young Rabi spoke English in the streets and Yiddish in his home. David and Sheindel Rabi, on the other hand, were never proficient with English, and, as a result, were reticent when they found themselves in an English-speaking environment. Thus it was that Israel Isaac got a new name. When Sheindel enrolled her son in public school, she was asked his name, and responded, "Izzy," the name she and her husband called him. Assuming Izzy to be short for Isidor, the school official put down that name : Israel Isaac Rabi was now, officially, Isidor Rabi. The mistake was never corrected. Later, as a young man, Rabi's response to anti-Semitism was to bring back the second I for Isaac, and, in so doing, to defiantly assert his Jewishness. Throughout his professional career he was known as I. I. Rabi, the two I's standing for Isidor Isaac. To his friends, to his sister Gertrude, to his wife Helen, he was "Rabi" [ pronounced to rhyme with "Bobby"] or simply Rab. 

   The Rabis were Orthodox Hebrew --- a demanding religion. In In the regimen of Judaism, however, the life of the Rabis was buoyed up by their faith that God was directly involved with them, an active and interested participant in their daily and hourly affairs. "Even in casual conversation, God entered, not every paragraph, more like every sentence,  Rabi has said of his childhood. "There was a certain intimacy with the idea of God, a comfortable feeling. He was a relative in a way. You could deal with HIM as Abraham did. " 

   Orthodox Judaism is both culture as well as a religion. "Belief has it," writes Israel Rubin, "that the main virtue of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, on account of which they merited redemption, was their retention of distinctiveness in dress, names, and language. " Thus,the Rabis named their first-born Israel Isaac --- after his rabbi godfather --- a name that left no doubt as to the boy's Jewish identity. They spoke Yiddish : "My mother and father could only read and write Yiddish in Hebrew characters."  David and Sheindel, however, were determined to provide a secular education for their children [a daughter, Gertrude, was born in January 1903] ; and from his earliest youth, Rabi knew that he would go to college :"WHEN I LOOK BACK ON IT, IT SEEMS ABSURD, BECAUSE WE HAD HARDLY ENOUGH MONEY FOR FOOD."

   Rabi's education began, as did that of all proper Jewish boys, in  Hebrew school at the age of three. A poor boy, he was brought together with other poor boys into "some evil smelling basement," where an ill-paid teacher with "no idea of pedagogy" held forth. The teacher "opened the Bible, would look at a letter, and say, 'This is Aleph, the first letter of the alphabet.' " But Rabi learned to read, and quickly. He honed his reading skill on the only books available to him --- Yiddish books and, of course, the Bible. "I could read long before I went to public school. I could read a Yiddish newspaper." 

   The religious influence in Rabi's boyhood was enhanced by Old World superstition. Rymanow, located in extreme eastern Europe some fifty kilometers from the Russian border, is in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains ---- Dracula country, a region famous for its vampires and ghosts, its evil spirits and devils. Rabi heard many hair-raising stories as a child : stories about unaccountably strange things happening to people, stories about face-to-face encounters with ghosts, stories about horrors in the dark times of night. One of his most vivid childhood memories is about looking down a New York street and seeing the full moon poised at the end of it : "One time I was walking along and looked down the street which faced east. The moon was just rising. And it scared the hell out of me ! Absolutely scared the hell out of me." 

   Another reality served to strengthen and intensify the Rabis' hold on their religious faith : the reality of poverty. David Rabi, unskilled as he was, worked at a variety of menial tasks : as a night watchman, in a coal cellar, as an iceman, and in a sweatshop where women's blouses were manufactured. Eventually, by saving and borrowing money, he was able to open a little grocery store, which he ran before and after his long day in the sweatshop ; during the day, Sheindel Rabi was a shopkeeper. In spite of all their hard work, the little store was never successful. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II ---- Episode 7

           A LITTLE ABOUT ROBERT OPPENHEIMER'S 
       PARENTS AND THE CUSHY LIFE INTO WHICH
      ROBERT WAS BORN ON APRIL 22, 1904 

   That Felix Adler officiated at Julius's wedding was extremely apt, since in the years that followed Julius was to become one of Adler's leading and most devoted disciples, his rise to prominence in his uncles' company running parallel with his rise within the Ethical Culture movement. At the time of his wedding, as the Rothfeld brothers were entering their sixties and approaching retirement age, Julius Oppenheimer was preparing to take over the running of the company. It was an opportune time to seize the reins. The advent of readyto-wear suits, which cut overheads, lowered prices and increased demand dramatically, had given the entire tailoring industry an enormous boost, and business was extremely good. The Rothfeld brothers did not live to see the best years f their company. Longevity was never a family trait and both brothers died before they reached seventy, Solomon in 1904 and Sigmund three years later. Upon Sigmund's death, in December 1907, Julius became president of Rothfeld, Stearn & Co. , which now had offices in that most prestigious of all New York addresses : FIFTH AVENUE. At thirty--six years old, Julius Oppenheimer was a man of means and substance. 
  Julius and Ella Oppenheimer, though never ostentatious, certainly led what many would consider a luxurious life. Son after they were married they moved into an apartment at 250 West 94th Street, just down the road from Ella's mother. It was a fairly large apartment in a fairly smart neighborhood, but nothing very out of the ordinary. Where, however, they went way beyond what most people would regard as being essential  to a civilized life was in the furnishing and decorating of the apartment, particularly with regard to paintings that adorned its walls. It was in those days customary among wealthy German Jewish New York families to have a private art collection. In this respect, as in so many others, the members of "OUR CROWD" tended to veer on the side of conservatism, caution and conformity. Abby, the central character in Emanie Sachs's Red Damask, sneers that they "haven't enough physical courage to go in for sports like the rich Gentiles, and a little too much brains. So they go in for art collection with an expert to help. They wouldn't risk a penny on their own tastes." 

   Left to his own devices, Julius might have fallen into the kind of conservatism mocked by Sachs, but in Ella he had his own expert, one who, having studied Impressionism in Paris, was certainly not afraid to risk money on her own taste. The result was an 

extraordinary private art collection that was the to be the pride of the family for generations. It included a Rembrandt etching, paintings by Vuillard, Derain and Renoir, no fewere than three Van Goghs --- Enclosed Field with Rising Sun, First Steps [ After Millet] and Portrait ofAdeline Ravoux and a "blue period" Picasso, Mother and Child. 
   The private contemplation of fine works of art might be seen as the very opposite of the way of life promoted by the Ethical Cuture Society, a society that emphasized social responsibility and the importance of the deed , of doing something practical to help those less well off than oneself. This was a society that set up educational programs for the working class ; that put forward practical suggestions for improving the health, the working conditions and the housing of New York ; that involved itself in trade-union disputes ; and that helped set up a number of nationally important campaigning groups --- the National Child Labor Committee, the Civil Liberties Unions, the Ladies's Garment Workers' Union, the Society for the Advancement of ColoredPeople, and so on. Spending large sums of money [even though JuliusandElla were"early buyers" of Van Gogh and Picasso, the cost of these paintings was still considerable] on works that would be seen only by one's immediate family and one's closest friends scarcely looks consistent with the ethics that inspired the movement and its many social and political initiatives. 

 And yet, when looked at in another way, it was not only consistent with Adler's vision, but a fulfillment of it. Despite the practical nature of much of the work of the Ethical CultureSociety, and despite its repudiation of theology, Adler's vision was first and foremost a spiritual one. His central motivation was to find a way of preserving the spiritual guidance that religions had provided, even after all faith in religious beliefs had been abandoned. He thought he had found what he was looking for in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with its emphasis on what Kant called the "Moral Law," which Kant thought all of us would find in our hearts. In a famous passage that Adler quotes in his discourses , CREED AND DEED, Kant writes : "Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence : the star-lit heavens above me, and the moral law within me." According to Kant, the moral law is the same for all people at all times and at all places, and according to Adler : "The moral law is the common ground upon which all religious and in fact all true men may meet. It is the one basis of union that remains to us amid the clashing antagonisms of the sects. . . all that is best and grandest in religious dogma is due to the inspiration of the moral law in man." 
   What, then, is the moral law ?" In Kant's formulation, it is this : "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." This means something like : do as you will be done by ; or : do to others what you would be happy to have done to you. Adler's formulation, however, is rather different :"The rule reads, 'Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other." 
   One brings out the "spiritual personality" by awakening in other people the sense of the sublime, of the infinite. Art is able to do this, Adler emphasizes, since it is a "high endeavor" and "Truly disinterestedness is the mark of every high endeavor." Thus : "The pursuit of the artist is unselfish, the beauty he creates is his reward." The goal of life is to pursue "the Ideal," which "is a void of form and its name unutterable." We can find the Ideal within ourselves --- in fact, we can only find it within ourselves ---through the discovery and appreciation of the moral law ; and the "high endeavors," of art, science, and public service, can help us find it. So the acquisition of fine works of art does not, after all, constitute "luxurious living,"but rather a means of fulfilling the "MORAL LAW." 
  It was in an environment governed by this idiosyncratic version of the moral law that a concerted effort would be made to "bring out the spiritual personality" of J. Robert Oppenheimer. 

JEWS IN AERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---Episode 6

GERMAN JEWS IN NEW YORK CITY AS WE ENTERED 1900

   The economic recession of 1893-1895 hit the clothing industry harder than any other and resulted in mass unemployment, although Rothfeld, Stern & Co. seemed to ride out the recession better than most clothing firms in New York. It moved its office to cheaper accommodations on Bleecker Street, but other than that there was no sign that it suffered very much. In 1895, Julius's younger brother Emil came to New York, by which time Julius, now twenty-four years old, was beginning to make his mark in the firm. In 1900, the company took the decision to specialize in in the importation of cloak linings, something on which Julius Oppenheimer quickly became an expert, and from that point he seems to have become the company's leading figure. In 1903, this was recognized when he was made a partner, a move that seems to have persuaded him that the time was right to marry and settle down. 
   His chosen bride was Ella Friedman, who, though a member of the same German ajewish, Upper West Side community as the Rothfelds and Oppenheimers, was seen as significantly less German, less Jewish and more "American" than Julius. For one thing, Ella was not a migrant; she had been born in America and English was her first language. According to her son, she did not speak German very well --- something that seemed, if anything, to be a source of pride rather than of embarrassment. Her father, Louis Friedman, was indisputably a German Jew, but, having migrated to Baltimore rather than to New York, in the 1840s, he had been in the U.S. a good deal longer than the Rothfelds or the Oppenheimers. Ella's mother, Cecilia Eger, had herself been born in America and, though from a Germanic background [her father was German, her mother Austrian], was, so it was said in the family anyway, not a German Jew, since she was non-Jewish. The claim is precarious to say the least. Cecilia's mother, Clara Binswanger, was --- about as Jewish as it is possible to be : both her maternal and paternal grandfathers were rabbis. Cecilia's father, David Eger, was a prominent member of the Philadelphia Jewish community, mentioned several times in the 1894 publication The Jews of Philadelphia. If J. Robert Oppenheimer inherited his striking blue eyes from his grandmother Cecilia, as was widely believed in the family, it was not because she was, from a genetic point of view, any less Jewish than his paternal grandparents. 

            EMPHASIS IS SWITCHING TO J. ROBERT
            OPPENHIEMER , BUT THEN WE' LL COMPARE
           THE WEALTHY OPPENHEIMERS TO THE DIRT 
           POOR FAMILY OF ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC GENIUS,
           I. I. RABI WHO WAS ALSO RAISED IN NEW YORK 
           CITY DURING THE EARLY 1900s 

Not only was Ella seen as more "American" than the family she was marrying into, but she was also was seen as more "refined." During the years that Julius spent working his way up the family textile business, Ella was studying art, first in her native Baltimore and then in Paris, where she made a particular study of the Impressionists. [ She may have met Mary Cassett.] On her return to America she taught at Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women in New York, which had opened in 1889 as an "annex" of Columbia University and from 1897 was housed in a building next to Columbia in Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. By the time she met Julius, Ella was an established and accomplished painter, with private students and her own rooftop studio. Her father had died in the early 1890s and she lived with her mother, Cecilia, in an apartment at 148 West 94th Street. Two years older than Julius, she would have been in her mid-thirties when they met, described by a family friend as "a gentle, exquisite, slim, tallish, blue-eyed woman, terribly sensitive, and extremely polite." She was born with an unformed right hand. To hide this --- and the artificial thumb and finger that she used to compensate for it ---- she always wore gloves, and her deformity was never once mentioned or even alluded to by the family. When a girlfriend of Robert's once asked him about it, she was met with stony silence. 
   It is not entirely clear how Julius and Ella met. It may have been that Ella's father was in the textile trade and knew the Rothfeld brothers, or it may have been that they had mutual friends in the Ethical Culture Society. Both suggestions have been made, although neither seems very likely. Her father had been dead for many years before she and Julius met, and it is not likely that her mother moved in the same circles as the Rothfelds. Nor is there any indication that Ella or anybody else in her family was a member of, or in any way interested in, Adler's Ethical Culture Society. 
   It seems more likely that it was their common interest in art that brought them together.  By 1903, Julius, as a partner in a thriving company, was a wealthy man and could afford to indulge his growing passion for the visual arts. It is reported that he "spent his free hours on weekends roaming New York's numerous art galleries." If so, given the way that wealth and enthusiasm attract invitations and introductions, it is not difficult to imagine that someone in the New York art world --- an artist, an agent, a gallery owner--- brought Julius and Ella together. 
   The cultural refinement that Ella represented was by this time something Julius craved. Though he had left school as a teenager, and had arrived in America speaking little English, he was determined to develop into a "proper gentleman" that his employees later described him as being. He dressed impeccably, acquired the social graces of the upper middle class and read widely, particularly in American and European history. Discovering that a German accent was a barrier to acceptance as a gentleman in the New York of the early twentieth century, Julius took drastic steps to remove all traces of his mother tongue, taking English lessons from an Oxford tutor, from whom he acquired the gentlemanly tones of the British educated elite. 
   Ella and Julius were married on March 23, 1903, their wedding being the occasion of a very public statement that they did not consider themselves Jewish. The service was performed not by a rabbi, but by Felix Adler himself, and not in accordance with any Jewish tradition, but rather as an illustration of the New Ideal" preached by the Ethical Culture Society. In his series of discourses,  Creed and Deed, published in 1886, Adler had written, in connection with his notion of what the "Priests of the New Ideal" might be be like : "there are special occasions in these passing years of ours, when the ideal bearings of life come home to us with particular force and when we require the priest to be their proper interpreter. Marriage is one of them." And so Ella and Julius were, in a way, married by a priest, but not in a way that implied commitment to any religious creed. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 5

                             THE ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY 

    Among that select group who gained membership right from its inception were Solomon and Sigfeld. With regard to the Rothfeld brothers' time in New York is a little sketchy. Little is known of their first five years in America, except that they set up some kind of business in the tailoring trade, which must have done fairly well. In 1874-75 they are listed in the New York City Directory as "importers of dry goods," with offices in Worth Street, Lower Manhattan. More significant as a measure of their social and financial success, however, is the fact that in the following year they appear as founding members of the Ethical Culture Society, along with Joseph Seligman, Jacob Schiff and Henry Morgenthau. Within seven years of being in America, then, the Rothfeld brothers had joined :Our Crowd," the elite of Manhattan German Jewish society. 
   In 1880, that society (including, no doubt, the Rothfeld brothers) was united in mourning the death of Joseph Seligman, known since the Saratoga incident as "America's leading Jew." Shortly before his death, Seligman hd asked that his funeral service should be directed by the Ethical Cultural Society. DEspite this request, the Seligman family and Gustav Gottheil, the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, conspired to give him a "proper Jewish funeral" at the synagogue. In addition, a funeral srvice conducted by felix Adler ws held in Seligman's house, an event that served to cement and increase the acceptance of Adler's society among New York's German Jewish elite. 
   It was, however, increasingly becoming a separate elite. In 1887, the nature of New York's high society was spelled out when the first volume of the Social Register for New york appeared, listing 2,000 or so families that were considered the creme de lacreme of Manhattan.  NOT ONE OF THEM WAS JEWISH, It author,  Ward McAllister, suggested : "our good Jews might wish to put out a little book of their own." In the face of such painful reminders that they were not accepted by New York high society, many prominent members of the German Jewish community migrated from the Upper East Side of Manhattan [ where, along Fifth Avenue, the likes of the Astors had their grand "brownstones" ] to form what has been described as "the first recognizably German Jewish upper-class neighborhood " on the Upper West Side. It was to this neighborhood that Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld moved in 1887, after they had joined with their cousin, J.H. Stern, to form Rothfeld, Stern & Co., a company that specialized in importing tailoring materials. Their names would never appear in the Social Register, but among their immediate neighbors now were Goldmans, Sachses and Guggenheims. 

   Meanwhile the "THIRD MIGRATION" of Jews to America was gaining momentum and, as the German Jewish community had feared, arousing a new and intensified form of anti-Semitism. In the same year that the Social Register was published and the Rothfeld brothers moved to the Upper West Side, an article appeared in Forum magazine entitled "Race Prejudice at Summer Resorts," which identified anti-Semitism as "a new feature in the New World." "Only within the present decade," the article stated, "has there been an anti-Jewish sentiment openly displayed in the United States." The blame for this ws laid by Alice Rhine, the author of the article, firmly on Judge Hilton, whose exclusion of Jews from his hotel in Saratoga had set an example that other hotel and boardinghouse proprietors had followed. "In seeking reasons for this sweeping ostracism, " she wrote, "it is found that the Gentiles charge the Hebrews with 'being too numerous' ; 'they swarm everywhere.' " It was also said, she recorded, that Jews lacked refinement ; they dressed badly, had bad manners and showed disrespect for the Christian Sabbath. 
   The kind of anti-Semitism discussed by Rhine was extremely mild, however, compared to the sort that was unleashed at around the same time in The American Jew, described as "the book that inaugurated racial anti-Semitism in America." Its author was Telemachus Timayenis, a Greek immigrant. Whereas Rhine described a prejudice against Jews as identified by their culture, their language and their perceived lack of social graces, Timayenis's target was the Jew as a RACIAL type. identified by  "their hooked noses, restless eyes, elongated ears, square nails, flat feet, round knees, and soft hands." The Jews that he describes with venomous hatred wear "long coats dripping with filth, while their faces and beards look suety with sluttishness" ; they arrive in the United States penniless, and soon ---- suspiciously soon, according to Timayentis --- become prominent bankers, and leaders of American industry. But despite his unease at the wealth of the German Jews, it is the wretched poverty of the eastern Jewson the Lower East Side that most exercises Timayenis, who is also inclined to despise Jews because they are refugees from prejudice. "Let the Jews of this country understand," he writes, "that the American people do not want, and will not receive, the dregs of a race which has won only scorn and contempt from the people of Europe." The message of The American Jew, repeated several times throughout the book, is : "The Jew must go! " 
   Timaayenis, of course, did not speak for the whole American population, the majority of whom would have identified far more readily with the famous sentiments expressed by Emma Lazarus in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which was dedicated by President Cleveland in 1886, sentiments that indeed were inspired by the piteous sight of the arrival to New York of the very Jews that had aroused the venom of The American Jew : 

     Give me your tired, your poor ;
     Your buddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

   The Statue of Liberty would have been the first thing that Julius Oppenheimer saw when he came to the United States in 1888 to join his prosperous and well-connected uncles and take his place among "Our Crowd." He was at that time a slim, good-looking, but shy seventeen-year-old who spoke little English. However, he clearly lost no time in joining the cultural, spiritual and [perhaps most importantly] social world of his uncles. In the yer of his arrival in New York, he is listed as a member of Adler's Ethical Culture Society. Though he was, of course, immediately given a position in Rothfeld, Sterm & Co., he could not yet afford to live on the Upper West Side and, for the first few years before his inexorable rise through the company's hierarchy, lived in rented accommodation in Lower Manhattan, the same part of town in which the company had its office. 
   In many ways Julius Oppenheimer was arriving in Americaat a bad time. The so-called "Gilded Age," when unimaginably large fortunes were amassed by the Robber Barons [Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil, Vanderbilt in railroads and Astor in real estate], and smaller but still significant fortunes were made by Jewish bankers and traders, was coming to an end, as the country headed toward recession. No doubt related to the darkening economic scene was the growth of racial anti-Semitism, which , while rarely as virulent as that expressed in The American Jew, could still shock many of those German Jewish migrants who had believed in America as a land free from the "old strife." 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 4

          WHAT THE GERMAN JEWS WHO SETTLED IN 
          NEW YORK CITY WANTED WAS TO BE 
          ACCEPTED ---- doesn't sound unreasonable to me 

   There was an earnest desire among the wealthy Jewish community in New York to "fit in," both with each other and with the wider society. As the names given to the Seligman offspring illustrate, what those prosperous German Jews wanted, perhaps above all, was to be accepted as Americans. 
   The loyalty this generation of German Jewish migrants felt toward the United States had its origin in the contrast between the restrictions they had experienced in Germany and the freedom and opportunities they had found in America. Until the Civil War, America had been for these migrants almost everything that they had been promised it would be. Of course, every Jew in America would, at some time or other, have come across anti-Semitic prejudice , but the state itself was not Hebrews anti-Semitic; there was no institutionalized anti-Semitism enshrined in law, decree or officially sanctioned customs. In the years during and after the Civil War, however, this began to change, partly because of the conspicuous success of the German Jews, and partly because life in the United States for everyone during these years became darker and more troubled. 

           THE ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY --- AFFLUENT 
           JEWISH FAMILIES BELONGED TO THIS CLUB TO
           LOSE THEIR JEWISHNESS 

   The leader of the EthicalCulture Society was Felix Adler, a German Jew whose father, Samuel Adler, was, from 1856 to his death in 1873, the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, the spiritual center of "OUR CROWD." When Samuel Adler died, Felix, then just twenty-two years old, was invited to deliver a sermon at the Temple Emanu-El, presumably as a prelude to being invited to take his father's place as rabbi. However, as the sermon he gave, "The Judaism of the Future," effectively ended any possibility there might have been of him succeeding his father. At the same time, however, it inspired in the minds of many who heard it a vision of what Reform Judaism might evolve into. 
   In the sermon Adler spoke of the "ruins" of religion, among which he explicitly included Judaism, and asked the question : what remains when the ruins are removed ? His answer, which would form the basis both for the EthicalCulture Society and for the Weltanschauung in which Oppenheimer was brought up, was : MORALITY. Judaism, Adler proclaimed, was well placed to provide leadership to the religion of the future, since it always had been , essentially, a religion of DEED rather than creed. In this sense, Adler claimed, Judaism as a moral force "was not given to the Jews alone," but rather had a destiny "to embrace in one great moral state the whole family of men."  

   Adler's talk of the "ruins" of Judaism did not go down well among the majority of the congregation of Temple Emanu-El, and he was never asked to address the synagogue again. However, for a small but influential minority his view of the "Judaism of the future" seemed to be the perfect solution to two pressing problems : (1) how to be a Jew if one did not actually believe any elements of the Jewish creed ; and (2) how to combine being a good Jew with being a good American. 

   After a career asa rabbi was denied to him, Adler was offered, and accepted, a professorship in Hebrew at Cornell University. While there, he ran into trouble when he was accused of being an atheist, but, back in New York City, moves were afoot to attract him back as the head of the Judaism of the future--- the vision of which he had outlined in his divisive sermon. And so, in 1876, Adler gave a talk in New York in which he announced the establishment of a new organization, the Ethical Culture Society . This was to be a religion without a religious belief, a "practical religion."  " We propose," Adler announced : 


     to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual . . . freely do I own to this purpose of reconciliation and candidly do I confess that it is my dearest object to exalt the present movement above the strife of contending sects and parties, and at once to occupy that common ground where we may all meet, believers and unbelievers, for purposes in themselves, lofty and unquestioned by any . . . freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man. . . DIVERSITY IN THE CREED, UNANIMITY IN THE DEED. This is that practical religion from which none dissents. This is that Platform broad enough to receive the worshipper and the infidel. This is that common ground where we may all grasp hands as brothers united in mankind's common cause. 

   "Adler's proposal for a new movement," Howard B. Radest, a historian of the movement has written, "had the virtue of completing an Americanization without betraying what his listeners regarded as the core of the Jewish faith ---its prophetic tradition --- It was, we suggest, no accident that Adler's address echoed the First Amendment to the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, for at Cornell Adler had traced the connection between prophetic and democratic values." 
   The Ethical Culture Society received its certification of incorporation in February 1877. It was not then, nor was it ever, a mass movement. In some ways it was more like an exclusive club : to become a member one needed the sponsorship of another member. "The Sunday Meeting," Radest writes, "was a social occasion, too. Here one greeted old friends, came to see and be seen, came to be entertained." It was not a religion at all, still less a proselytizing one. "Ethical Culture seemed to make it difficult for people to discover it or, having discovered it, to find their way into its ranks. In some circles the impression still exists of a rather select group." 

   
   
   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 Until WORLD WAR II --- Episode 3

     GERMAN JEWS REACT TO ARRIVAL OF JEWS IN NEW 
    YORK CITY FROM RUSSIA AND POLAND 

    The arrival of the Russian and Polish Jews was such an embarrassment to the established  German Jewish community that their first reaction to it was to argue, through editorials in their newspaper, American Hebrew, and direct lobbying from their organization, the United Hebrew Charities of New York, for the introduction of tougher immigration laws. When this came to nothing and the number of Eastern European Jewish immigrants kept rising,the German Jews set up the Education Alliance, which organized Americanization programs in which the new immigrants were instructed in "the privileges and duties of American citizenship." What drove these measures were not only the German Jews' love of America, but also a dread of the anti-Semitism which they feared the Eastern Jews would arouse. The Jewish historian Gerald Sorin points out :"These uptowners were very taken with Israel Zangwill's play 'The Melting Pot'. They saw in it a reinforcement of their own proposed solution for the problems of downtown : the sooner immigrants from eastern Europe gave up their cultural distinctiveness and melted into the homogenized mass, the sooner anti-Semitism would also melt."

   It was a strategy that German Jews had tried unsuccessfully in Germany, but which seemed to be working in the United States. It required, however, constant vigilance with respect to "cultural distinctiveness," a vigilance that could easily slip into the kind of self-denial of which Rabi accused Oppenheimer. One form this vigilance took was an acute sensitivity among German Jews about their names. Sometimes this led to the abandonment of German-sounding surnames, a notable example being Arthur Schonberg, the son of an impoverished Jewish family from the Rhineland, who would become famous as the millionaire New York banker August Belmont. More often, though, it tool the form of changing one's first name and giving toone's children names that sounded reassuringly "American." Joseph Seligman, another millionaire New York banker, brought his brothers, Wolfgang, Jacob, and Isias over from Germany, but on arrival they became William, James, and Jesse. The names of Joseph Seligman's children look like a roll call of American heroes : George Washington Seligman, Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, and Alfred Lincoln Seligman (evidently "Abraham" was considered too Judaic). 
   Of the American heroes commemorated in these names, the least well known today is undoubtedly Robert Anderson.  He was a major in the U.S army at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 and was involved in the opening hostilities, when Ft. Sumter in South Carolina, which was then  under his command, came under fire from the Confederates. For holding his ground and defending the fort for thirty-four hoursMajor Anderson was promoted by Abraham Lincoln to Brigadier General and became a national hero, not just for the duration of the war, but also for many decades afterward. Because of him, the name "Robert" became immensely popular. For anyone wanting to affirm the identity of their offspring, it was the natural choice. Indeed J. Robert Oppenheimer was to like it so much that he ignored the "J" in his name and was known, by the family and friends, simply as "Robert" or "Bob." When he was asked what the "J" stood for, he would reply that it stood for nothing. In fact, as his birth certificate shows, it stands for "Julius," his father's name. For anyone striving to avoid "cultural distinctiveness," the name "Robert Oppenheimer," or even "J. Robert Oppenheimer," had obvious advantages over "Julius Oppenheimer." 

   Even so, the surname remained, and it was as "culturally distinctive" as a name can be, identifying its bearers' ancestors both geographically and ethnically. "As appears from his name," one of Oppenheimer's professors once wrote in an academic reference, "Oppenheimer is a Jew." If, ignoring Haskalah, one clung to the notion of Judaism as a defining race, a nation or a tribe, rather than simply a religion, then the professor was correct. After the Napoleonic decree of 1808, which required Jews to take a surname, "Oppenheimer" was the name adopted by those Jews who lived in the area around the small and fairly obscure town of Oppenheim, which lies in the Hesse area of Germany, between Mainz and Worms, not far from Frankfurt. With regard to J. Robert Oppenheimer, what "appears from the name" is that his ancestors were among those Hessian Jews. Could he look upon them and say, "These are my people?" Well, after his political awakening in the 1930s, when his relatives --- like all Jews in Germany --- were facing the horrors of the Nazis, his determination to play a part in defeating Hitler's regime did suggest some feeling of kinship with the victims of the Third Reich. But, until then, his reaction to his German Jewish relatives was to look upon them as if they came from a very distant time and place. When, as a child, he went to Germany on a family visit and met his grandfather, Benjamin Oppenheimer, who still lived just a few miles from Oppenheim, his impression [or so he later recalled] was of "an unsuccessful small businessman, born himself in a hovel, really, in an almost medieval German village." This, one feels, is the impression of a child used to the wealth of the Upper West Side and the modernity of twentieth-century Manhattan ; whether Benjamin would be regarded as "unsuccessful," his birthplace a "hovel" and his home town "medieval" by people with less exalted standards is, I think, doubtful. 

   The "almost medieval village" was presumably Hanau, a town northeast of Oppenheim, where Benjamin Oppenheimer lived and where his son, Julius, was born in 1871. Julius spent just seventeen years in Hanau before, in 188, leaving for America. Whatever the truth about Benjamin Oppenheimer's circumstances, the family clearly had aspirations for a better life than was possible in Hanau and, like many other German Jews, thought they could fulfill those aspirations in America. Julius' younger brother and sister, Emil and Hedwig, joined him a few years after he had set sail, and Julius himself was following the example of his two uncles, Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld [ "Sol and Sig" as they were known in the family], who had migrated to the United States a generation earlier. 

   The ambition may have come from Benjamin's wife, Babette Rothfeld, since the two uncles in question were her brothers. "Sol and Sig" left for America in 1869, nearly twenty years before Julius Oppenheimer came to join them, but more than thirty years after the "SECOND MIGRATION" had begun. In those thirty years or so, a great deal had happened to the German Jewish community in America. Or, rather, one should say that in those years the American German Jewish community had been created, its development demonstrating both that the United States could indeed realize many of the hopes expressed in Max Lilienthal's letter, and that it could not entirely live up to the promise of being a land in which "old strife" between Jew and Christian had been forgotten. 

   By 1869, the German Jewish migrants who had landed in America thirty or so years earlier had formed a successful social group, among whom were a surprisingly large number of families that had become extremely wealthy. Within a single generation, the Seligmans, the Lehmans, the Guggenheims, the Schiffs, the Goldmans and the Saches had all amassed vast fortunes and beccome founders of some of the best-known, most successful and most powerful financial and commercial institutions in America. They had also created a fairly tight-knit community, known to its members as "OUR CROWD," a Jewish version of the more conspicuously wealthy group of families---the Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Roosevelts, and so on --- that constituted New York's gentile high society during this period. "OUR CROWD" was a self-consciously cohesive community, whose members worshipped together at the Temple Emanu-El [ the Reform Jewish synagogue, whose imposing building on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1868, was a symbol of the success and aspirations of the German Jewish community] , socialized together, took holidays together and chose their wives and husbands from each other's families. 
   
  
   

Jews in America from 1800 until World War II --- Episode 2

        The Mass Migration of Jews To America in the Mid-1800s 

   The mass migration of German Jews to America that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century was intimately bound up with their earlier abandonment of the traditional trappings of Jewish identity. Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, was an essentially German movement, its prophet being the great Prussian Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, which led in turn to that other essentially German movement, Reform Judaism, encouraged Jews to, literally and metaphorically, leave the ghetto in which they had been confined and embrace the modernizing ideas of the wider Western European Enlightenment. This meant using German rather than Hebrew as the language of worship, abandoning traditions and customs that served to isolate Jews from the rest of society, and reforming Jewish education so that it prepared people for the world at large rather than schooling them in a separate culture. The hope that inspired these changes was that, in return for abandoning those aspects of their culture that identified them as radically different from others, the Jews would receive from the gentile world  a lifting of the discriminatory laws that affected almost every aspect of their lives, and a full acceptance as members of society with the same legal, financial, and political rights as other citizens.  Thus fully assimilated, Jews would no longer think of themselves as a separate race or nation, but rather as adherents of a religion. Their nationality would be GERMAN , and they would be not a bit less German for worshipping in a synagogue rather than a church.
   It was the dashing of this hope that persuaded hundreds of thousands of German Jews in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to turn their backs on their home country and look to America to find the freedom and equality they had failed to achieve in Germany. Thus, in the eyes of German Jews, America became not only a refuge from discrimination and prejudice, but also the national embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, the ideals of Haskalah. Many of them therefore ceased trying to become accepted as Germans  and sought to become accepted as Americans.  
 "Amerika, du hast es besser." These famous words of Goethe are contained in the poem "Den Vereingten Staaten" [ "To the United States" ] , written in 1827, when, as an old man, he reflected upon the advantages that youthful America had over the "Old Continent" in having no tradition, no "decaying castles," and being therefore free from the continuous strife that comes from long memories. The image of America that Goethe's poem conjures up is one of a tabula rasa, waiting, so to speak, to have its history written upon it. This was an image perfectly suited to arouse the interest and expectations of the German Jews, a group who longed to start afresh, free from the tensions and prejudices of the past. 
   And so, beginning in the 1820s, the rallying cry "On to America" echoed throughout the Jewish community in Germany. A whole movement grew up dedicated to the encouragement of migration to the United States, publicizing the financial, social and political advantages of the New World, and providing hope and support to those prepared to make what must have been an alarming as well as  an exciting fresh start. In books by Europeans who had been to America, in letters to relatives from those who had migrated, and in village meetings where people gathered to her firsthand accounts of American life from migrants who had returned to visit families, the image of America as "the common man's utopia" was spread, inspiring more and more Jews to set sail for the United States. 
   A typical example of such inspirational firsthand accounts is a letter written in November 1846 by the journalist and academic Max Lilienthal, which was published in the German Jewish weekly newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenbums. Extolling "the beautiful ground of civil equality" that he had discovered in America, Lilienthal announced : "The old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a bad dream. . . At last I breathe in liberty . . . Jew or Christian, Christian or Jew --- this old strife is forgotten, and only the man as such is respected and loved." Encouraging others to follow his example, he urged : "Shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure . . . become a human being like everybody else." And, he promised, in America : "Jewish hearts are open in welcome. Jewish organizations ready to help anyone. Why should you go on carrying the burden of legal exclusion ?" 
   The number of German Jews willing and eager to "shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure" was so large that it completely transformed the American Jewish community. In 1840, there were just 15,000 Jews in the United States ; by 1880, there were 280,000 , most of whom were of German origin. This influx of German Jews is known to Jewish historians as the "Second Migration" --- the "First Migration" being the arrival in the seventeenth century of a small community of Sephardic Jews. These were descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, who, by the nineteenth century, were a well-established part of American life. 
   These self-styled "old American Sephardic families" took pride in the fact that they had been in America for as many generations as the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and tended to treat the new German arrivals with the kind of lofty disdain with which the German Jews would later treat the Russians and Poles. The first German Jews to arrive in America accepted the leadership of the old Sephardic community and even adopted the Sephardic form of worship. When the number of German Jewish migrants began to increase dramatically, however, the balance of power shifted and the German Ashkenazi Jews replaced the Sephardim as the leaders of the Jewish community. 
   The mass influx into America of Russian and Polish Jews, which took place from 1880 to 1920, formed the "Third Migration," and was on an entirely different scale from the previous two, being measured not in the tens of thousands, or in the hundreds of thousands, but in millions. Roughly two and a half million Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in the United States during the Third Migration, bringing with them a very different kind of Jewish culture from that of either the Sephardim or the Germans. 
   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 1

             JEWS IN SCIENCE  IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE 
            NINETEENTH & EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES 


Isidor Rabi And Robert Oppenheimer : Both Were Physicists ; 
     Both Were From New York ; and Both Were Jewish 

   Isidor Rabi [ Rabi rhymes with "Bobby" ] once remarked that his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer was "a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters," who "never got to be an integrated personality."  What prevented Oppenheimer from being fully integrated, Rabi thought, was his denial of a central part of himself : his Jewishness. As the physicist Felix Bloch, echoing Rabi, once put it , Oppenheimer "tried to act as if he were not a Jew and succeeded well because he was a good actor." And, because he was acting, he lost sight of who he really was. Oppenheimer had an impressive and wide-ranging collection of talents, abilities and personal characteristics, but where the central, united core of his personality ought to have been, Rabi thought, there was a gap and so there was nothing to hold those "bright shining splinters" together. "I understood his problem, " Rabi said, and when asked what that problem was, replied simply : "Identity." 

    
Rabi spoke as someone who, by virtue of his background, intelligence, and education  was well placed to understand Oppenheimer's "problem." He and Oppenheimer had a great deal in common : they were roughly the same age [ Rabi was six years older] , they were both theoretical physicists, were both brought up in New York City and were both descended from European Jewish families. Behind this last similarity, however, lay a fundamental difference. Rabi was proud of his Jewish inheritance and happy to define himself in terms of it. Though he had no religious beliefs, and never prayed, he once said that when he saw Orthodox Jews at prayer, the thought that came into his mind was : "These are my people." 
   No such thought could have entered Oppenheimer's mind, no matter who he was looking at. There was no group to whom he could point and say : "These are my people," and not just because of his ambivalence about his Jewish background. It was also because that background itself, regardless of Oppenheimer's feelings about it, could not have provided him with a sense of belonging and, therefore, the sense of identity that Rabi thought was missing in him. Rabi, despite his lack of religious beliefs, was Jewish in a fairly straightforward and unambiguous way ; the Jews simply were "his people." Theirs was the community to which he belonged. One cannot say the same thing about Oppenheimer. The sense in which he was Jewish, the sense in which he did --- and did not --- come from, and belong to, a Jewish community, is far more complicated and, as Rabi has perceptively noted, crucial in understanding the fragility of his sense of identity. 

   For an understanding of the elusive nature of Oppenheimer's Jewishness, the contrast between his family background and Rabi's is instructive. Despite their many and important similarities, and despite the fact that they grew up within a few miles of each other, Rabi and Oppenheimer were born into and brought up in families that were culturally worlds apart. Rabi was a "Polish Jew." Born in Galicia to a poor, Yiddish-speaking family of Orthodox Jews, he came to New York as an infant and was raised, first in the crowded slums of the Lower East Side and then in a tiny apartment in the Brownsville Section of Brooklyn.   Oppenheimer was born not in Europe, but in New York City, to a WEALTHY FAMILY that had abandoned its Jewish faith and traditions a generation earlier. The bustling and crowded "Jewish Ghetto" of the Lower East Side would have seemed utterly alien to the young Oppenheimer, who was brought up in an enormous luxury apartment in the genteel Upper West Side. The family had never spoken Yiddish, and, though German was his father's first language, it ws never spoken at home. 

   And yet, despite regarding himself neither as German nor Jewish, Oppenheimer was seen, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as a "German Jew." In New York in the early twentieth century the central division among the Jewish community was between, on the one hand, the German Jews and, on the other, the Polish and Russian Jews --- the differences between the two groups accurately mirrored by the differences between Oppenheimer and Rabi. The German Jews, sometimes called "Uptown Jews," were on the whole wealthier, more assimilated and less religious than their Polish and Russian counterparts, to whom they were notoriously condescending. At the time of Oppenheimer's birth in 1904 there were more Polish and Russian Jews in New York than German Jews, but the Germans assumed leadership of the Jewish community and took it upon themselves to help "Americanize"the Russians and Poles, who reacted with resentment at what they saw as a dismissal of their religion and their customs. 
   What Rabi called Oppenheimer's problem---the problem of identity--- was, in fact, a problem for the entire American Jewish community, perhaps its central problem. Certainly it was the issue at the heart of the tension between the two groups of Jews in New York City. For the Russian and Polish Jews, their sense of identity was bound up with their Jewishness : their Orthodox religious beliefs, their Yiddish language and their Jewish culture and traditions. That sense of identity, that culture, however, had been abandoned by the German Jews before they even came to America.