Abstract
Arguing that key ideas of American Jewish liberalism, such as the separation of church and state, are grounded in experiences in east Europe, this chapter rejects theories holding that Jewish liberalism is a unique and separate feature of American Jewish History. Jews capitalized on unusual sociopolitical opportunities in the United States when they embraced political formulas – but, equally true, they were drawn to liberalism on the basis of pre-immigration experiences in Russia, and ongoing identity issues, which were shared by Jews in many countries. Rather than separating American Jews from other Jewish political ideologies, liberalism often linked them to Jewish political activists, and to Jewish causes, in other countries. For example, prominent American Jewish proponents of liberal inclusion in the country’s “melting pot” were also Zionists who promoted Jewish separation in Ottoman or British-controlled Palestine.
A short, reworded, portion in this chapter is printed with permission of the University of Alabama Press.
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09 February 2021
The book was inadvertently published with an incorrect chapter title of captioned title as “From East to West: As the Liberal Melting Pot of Jewish Politics” whereas it should be “From East to West: America as the Liberal Melting Pot of Jewish Politics”. The chapter title has been updated in the book.
Notes
- 1.
“Milton Himmelfarb, Wry Essayist, 87, Dies,” The New York Times, Jan. 15 2006.
- 2.
Moore, At Home in America, 201–30.
- 3.
Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion.
- 4.
For an overview: Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution.
- 5.
Podhoretz, Why are Jews Liberal.
- 6.
Feingold, American Jewish Political Culture.
- 7.
For an example of such critical reexamination of whether Jewish processes in a particular urban milieu emanated out of an ideological devotion to liberalism: Berman, Metropolitan Jews.
- 8.
See, for example, Stanley and Bell, Making Sense of American Liberalism; McGown, American Liberalism; Foner, The Story of American Freedom; Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal.
- 9.
Wiebe, The Search for Order.
- 10.
Vital, The Origins of Zionism.
- 11.
For an assessment of the compulsory education affair’s impact on the consolidation of Orthodoxy:: Etkes, “Compulsory Education as a Crossroads,” 202–16; Silver, “Rabbi Max Lilienthal,” 343–72; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 111–54; Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 111–54.
- 12.
Ruben, Lilienthal, 54–5.
- 13.
Circumstances and motives propelling Lilienthal’s flight from Russia are discussed in: Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 85–91.
- 14.
Ruben, Lilienthal, 142.
- 15.
Ibid., 161.
- 16.
Ibid., 166–168.
- 17.
Raisanovsky, Nicholas I.
- 18.
Ruben, Lilienthal, 167.
- 19.
Ibid., 175.
- 20.
Ibid., 169, 186.
- 21.
Max Lilienthal, “The Flag and the Union,” reprinted in Philipson, ed., Max Lilienthal, 404.
- 22.
Ibid., 182.
- 23.
Sarna, “The Cult of Synthesis,” 52–79.
- 24.
Jick, The Americanization of the Synagogue; Sarna, American Judaism, 124–34.
- 25.
The standard exposition of immigration politics, through the 1920s, is: Higham, Strangers in the Land.
- 26.
For instance, in pre-WWI America, the important, middle class left-liberal movement, Progressivism, was by and large pro-restriction, being sympathetic to the organized labor argument about how large-scale immigration presumably lowered the wages of working Americans. Noah, The Great Divergence, 213–214.
- 27.
Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” (February 18, 1905): 190–4; Ibid., (February 25, 1915): 217–20.
- 28.
A strong presentation of this argument about inherent liberalism connecting melting pot and multi-cultural theories can be found in: Gleason, Speaking of Diversity, 25–6. In his influential volume, David Hollinger makes the same point, though he formulates it somewhat obliquely (“Part of the problem is that virtually no one defends monoculturalism, with the result that multiculturalism is deprived of an honest, natural opposite.”): Hollinger, Postethnic America, 80.
- 29.
Gleason (p. 26) makes this point in strong language, arguing that “for many Americans,” the melting pot became a “cherished” symbol of liberal values – “openness toward the future, receptiveness to immigrants and the cultural values they bring, and the gradual and harmonious integration of these immigrants and their descendants into the ever evolving life of the nation.”
- 30.
Lazarus opened her Zionist manifesto with a quotation from Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and then refers to this novel’s allusion to the “torch of visible community” in the booklet’s opening letter: Lazarus, An Epistle, 15.
- 31.
Lazarus, Songs of a Semite..
- 32.
“Huddled Masses? What Poem Would Trump Like to See on the Statue of Liberty,” Guardian staff The Guardian, August 20, 2017.
- 33.
Zangwill, The Melting Pot.
- 34.
Lazarus, An Epistle to the Hebrews.
- 35.
Schor, Emma Lazarus; quote from: Sam Roberts, “How a Sonnet Made a Statue the ‘Mother of Exiles,” The New York Times, City Room Blog, October 26, 2011.
- 36.
Zangwill, The Melting Pot.
- 37.
Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom,” 187–225.
- 38.
Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto, 188.
- 39.
Israel Zangwill was one of this League’s male members. Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause, 135.
- 40.
Shilony, Jewish National Fund, 125–30.
- 41.
For background to the Uganda proposal: Heymann, ed., The Uganda Controversy Vol. 1.
- 42.
The story of the Zangwill-led ITO is a growth industry in Jewish historical scholarship. Two recent studies on this subject are: Alroey, Zionism without Zion; Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion.
- 43.
Zangwill, The Melting Pot, 33.
- 44.
For analyses of the play’s themes and public effects: Rochelson, A Jew in the Public Arena, 180–9; Wohlgelernter, Israel Zangwill, 176; Shumsky, “Zangwill’s The Melting Pot,” 29–41; Nahshon, From the Ghetto; Gleason, Speaking of Diversity, 3–31.
- 45.
Meri-Jane Rochelson, “Zionism, Territorialism, Race and Nation in the Thought and Politics of Israel Zangwill,” in: Between the East End and East Africa, eds., Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman, The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 150.
- 46.
Ibid., 157.
- 47.
Zangwill’s 1914 Afterword conveys his confused attitudes on race, combining liberal condemnation of contemporary racism with reinforcement of various pitilessly racist stereotypes. On the one hand, Zangwill predicts that “negrophobia” in America is “not likely to remain eternally at its present barbarous pitch,” and he does not completely rule out merits of black-white intermarriage, though he confines recommendation of this “adventure” to just a “few heroic souls.” He acknowledges that the “prognathous face” of the black in America is an “ugly and undesirable type of countenance,” and adds that this physiognomy “connotes a lower average of intellect and ethics.” His positive characterization of black features also depends on crude stereotype (blacks in America have a “joy of life, love of colour, keen senses, beautiful voice, and ear[s] for music”); and the playwright’s superficial outlook on race issues is underscored by the way he tries to project an air of fair-mindedness by criticizing and essentializing various white qualities (whites, it turns out, also have ape-like qualities, such as their “hairiness”). These confused ruminations are noteworthy in three ways. First, Zangwill recognizes that the issue of race is an exception (an “inconvenient element”) to his theory of the melting pot. Second, his statements about the desirability of keeping the melting pot white reflect the author’s highly personalized, and primarily aesthetic (as compared to ethical), commitment to whiteness (as explained in a previous chapter). Here Zangwill writes that whites should remain with whites in America’s melting pot unless they are indifferent to the inevitable ugliness that will stain their descendants:
The negroid hair and complexion being, in Mendelian language, ‘dominant,’ these black traits are not easy to eliminate from the hybrid posterity; and in view of all the unpleasantness, both immediate and contingent, that attends the blending of colours, only heroic souls on either side should dare the adventure of intermarriage. (p. 207)
Finally, and most importantly, just as he advocated East Africa settlement as territorialist because he was convinced that Jewish settlement in the colony would strengthen the whiteness of their status in the empire, Zangwill lobbied for the melting pot in America because the Jew could and would remain white in it. This is the message Zangwill conveys in the final lines of this key section in his Afterword: “The Jew may be Americanised and the American Judaised without any gamic interaction.” (p. 207). See: Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot: A Drama in Four Acts, (London: AMS Press, 1925), 199–216.
- 48.
Ber Borochov, “On the Question of Zion and a Territory,” in Borochov, Philosophical Writings.
- 49.
Nathans, Beyond the Pale. In this 1904–1908 juncture when Borochov imposed melting pot rhetoric on the Uganda debate, and Zangwill influentially transposed the concept to the American setting, Vladimir Jabotinsky and other Jews were involved in salon debates in elite urban settings in the tsarist empire regarding the pros and cons of Jewish integration in a Russian melting pot.
- 50.
Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness.
- 51.
For background about Borochov: Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 329–63; Mattiyahu Mintz, Ber Borochov: Circle One, 1900–1906 (Hama’agal harishon) (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1976).
- 52.
Borochov, “On the Question,”, 139–41.
- 53.
Reports of disease and social discontent in Liberia circulated widely from the mid-nineteenth century, even though the sponsoring settlement organization, the American Colonization Society, was disposed to suppress them: Clegg, The Price of Liberty.
- 54.
Ibrahim Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery: 1914–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); James Ciment, Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013).
- 55.
Borochov, “On the Question,” 141.
- 56.
For instance, David Biale’s important discussion of Zangwill’s position on race issues in the melting pot does not refer to how the writer’s ideas about whiteness and racial amalgamation developed in his Jewish nationalist work, particularly during the Uganda debate. David Biale, “The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity,” in, Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel, eds. Insider/Outsider, 19–24.
- 57.
One scholar who made an unusual, and prodigious, effort to follow how east European Jewish political debates impinged on the Jewish political scene in the United States was Jonathan Frankel, in his volume Prophecy and Politics. Frankel’s analysis, however, was limited to reciprocal relations between Jewish nationalism and Jewish socialism along the Old World-New World axis, whereas this article has followed the interaction between Zionism and Jewish liberalism along the same east-west axis.
- 58.
Rosen, Louis D. Brandeis.
- 59.
These connections are explored in greater length in: Silver, Who Can Beat the Big Money?, 161–202.
- 60.
For the context of this remark: Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis, 409–13.
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Silver, M.M. (2020). From East to West: America as the Liberal Melting Pot of Jewish Politics. In: Green, A., Levis Sullam, S. (eds) Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_10
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