The Jews in America

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page & Company. Very Good+ in Good dj. 1923. First Edition. Hardcover. [light wear to extremities, spine slightly turned, a bit of dust-soiling to top edge of text block; the jacket is mildly edgeworn and a bit soiled]. (frontispiece map) This treatise starts off well enough, by decrying "the wave of anti-Semitism, which has been sweeping over the world since the ending of the Great War [and] has apparently reached the United States," citing examples such as "the most desirable clubs ... becoming more rigid in their inhospitable attitude toward Jewish members," or "a weekly newspaper, financed by one of the richest men in America [which] has filled its pages for three years with a virulent campaign against this element in our population." (This is, of course, a reference to Henry Ford and "The Dearborn Independent," whose 1920 series "The International Jew: The World's Problem" was a major contributor of anti-Semitic rhetoric.) In attempting to address some of the charges often leveled against Jewish immigrants (as posed in the front-jacket blurb, e.g. "Do Jews Make Good Americans? Do Jews Dominate American Finance?"), the author offers a sincere rebuttal -- but it starts to go off the rails as he begins to discuss the third phase" of Jewish immigration, and to demonstrate "the sharp cleavage in the Jewish race, i.e. between the German and Spanish (or Western) Jews and the Polish (or Eastern) Jews." The first two phases, you see, weren't a problem: first came the early Jewish Americans, the "Sephardic Jews" as he dubs them, who came largely from Spain; they were followed (ca. 1815-1880) by the German Jews, who, although generally "inferior, in manners, intelligence, and social adaptability, to the Spanish type," still caused no big problem. However, 1881 saw the beginning of "an entirely different type" of Jew, namely from Eastern Europe, notably Poland -- an "unassimilable" mass, with an "un-American creed." This, indeed, becomes the focus of the book's second half, unsubtly embodied in the chapter titles: "The 'Menace' of the Polish Jew" and "Radicalism Among the Polish Jews." It's no surprise that this book orginated as a series of articles in The World's Work, a monthly magazine with a distinctly pro-business point of view, in which the spread of such evils as labor unions and (gasp) socialism was regularly decried. Here's a typical expression, from page 145: "The great newspapers edited by Jews, published by Jews, and read by Jews, are preaching political principlles whose success means the destruction of the American system of government." The author (1870-1949) had been a muckraking journalist prior to becoming something of a cheerleader for American business elements, and during the 1920s was a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, in both the history and biography categories. ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-Fiction." .