How the Gilded Age (the era, not the TV show) created American Jewry

He didn’t, nevertheless, break the Gilded Age for me — that’s, the precise historic interval, roughly from the top of the Civil Struggle to the top of the nineteenth century. Like many others, I’m fascinated by the hallmarks of an extreme age: the lavish properties of the “robber barons,” the stultifying cultural codes of the excessive society “4 Hundred,” the literary therapies by Edith Wharton, Henry James and Sales space Tarkington. 

I’m additionally appalled by the distress of the interval: the abject poverty of the interior metropolis captured in Jacob Riis’ pictures, for instance, and the racist terrorism and white supremacist legal guidelines that ended Reconstruction. Because the historians Adam Mendelsohn and Jonathan Sarna describe the age, it was a “giddy period marked by freedom and disenfranchisement, extra and immiseration, alternative and exclusion, confidence and nervousness.”

What I not often thought of was how Jews match into this image. I knew of figures corresponding to August Belmont and the Lehman Brothers, who amassed nice fortunes however have been handled as arrivistes by the WASP elite. I knew Jewish immigrants from Romania and the Russian empire had begun to pour into New York by the Eighties, however I all the time felt their story belonged to the twentieth century (when, not so coincidentally, my very own grandparents arrived). After I learn a Wharton novel, my encounters with Jews have been each uncommon and sad.

Mendelsohn and Sarna have got down to restore the place of Jews within the post-Civil Struggle interval. They’ve edited the huge, forthcoming anthology, “Craving to Breathe Free: Jews within the Gilded Age” (Princeton College Library). The title is taken, in fact, from the poem inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty and written by the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, as fascinating a Gilded Age determine if there ever was one. 

Earlier this month, the American Jewish Historic Society in Manhattan placed on a day-long convention, “Jews within the Gilded Age,” with panels that includes most of the authors who contributed to the brand new ebook. It was a bit like Comedian Con for historical past nerds, or a minimum of for buffs like me who usually take heed to New York historical past podcasts corresponding to “The Bowery Boys” and its spinoff, Carl Raymond’s “The Gilded Gentleman.” Just like the ebook, the symposium fleshed out a sophisticated period, particularly in describing the seeds it planted for the American Jewish neighborhood as we all know it at the moment.

Historian Jonathan Sarna, co-editor of the brand new anthology “Craving to Breathe Free,” and Zev Eleff of Gratz Faculty converse on a panel on “Jews of the Gilded Age” on the American Jewish Historic Society in Manhattan, Oct. 2, 2022. (James Ferraro)

One huge seed was the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, based in 1886. Earlier than it turned the flagship of Conservative Judaism, JTS was an try by traditionalists to thwart the rise of the intimidatingly liberal Reform Judaism. Solely later did it emerge because the “third approach” of American Judaism between Reform and Orthodoxy, as Sarna mentioned on a panel that included Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik of New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel and the present chancellor of JTS, Shuly Rubin Schwartz. 

The large financial enlargement of the age created huge alternatives for Jews. Mendelsohn and a fellow panelist, Roger Horowitz of the Hagley Museum and Library, described the circumstances that allowed even poor immigrants to get a leg up, from the exploding marketplace for readymade clothes and low-cost shopper items to new industries like vaudeville, sheet music and the films.

And as these “alrightniks” moved into the administration class, Jewish staff started to arrange in ways in which anticipated the labor motion — and liberal voting patterns — of the twentieth century. New wealth additionally liberated Jewish girls from home labors; historians Pamela Nadell and Esther Shor mentioned how Lazarus and the essayist Nina Morais Cohen used this freedom to defend their fellow Jews from burgeoning antisemitism.

That antisemitism was the inevitable backlash to Jewish success. Yeshiva College’s Jeffrey Gurock spoke in regards to the founding of the American Jewish Historic Society itself, saying that considered one of its fundamental features was “apologetics” — that’s, chronicling and someday exaggerating the Jewish contributions to the founding of the USA with a view to counter rising antisemitism and anti-immigrant nativism. You acknowledge that insecure impulse at the moment at any time when a Jewish buddy forwards a listing of Jewish Nobel Prize-winners or the newest “proof” that Christopher Columbus was a Jew.

In a session on depictions of the Gilded Age in motion pictures and tv, Hale reiterated his criticism of the HBO collection, but in addition famous the methods Jews within the collection are “current by their absence.” The character George Russell just isn’t recognized as a Jew, however, as Hale and co-panelist Miriam Mora agreed, is “coded” Jewish by his try to interrupt into outdated line New York society and the WASP characters’ makes an attempt to maintain him out. He’s additionally one of many few characters within the collection performed by a Jewish actor, Morgan Spector (who additionally starred in HBO’s “The Plot Towards America”).

Shuly Rubin Schwartz, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, speaks about Judaism within the Gilded Aged throughout a symposium on the American Jewish Historic Society in Manhattan, Oct. 2, 2022. (James Ferraro)

For Mora, director of packages on the Heart for Jewish Historical past, a extra sincere portrayal of the Gilded Age was Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 movie “Hester Avenue.” Set on the Decrease East Aspect in 1896, the unbiased movie dared to depict “Americanization as a detrimental.” Its protagonists are a striving Jewish husband who detests the Outdated Nation, and a spouse who’s making an attempt to carry on to her traditions. No saccharine Hollywood depiction of the Gilded Age — like “Meet Me in St. Louis” or “Hiya Dolly!” — would have dared acknowledge these prices. 

For a lot of Jews at the moment, the Gilded Age appears like a grainy black-and-white {photograph}, however as an alternative of a lavish black-tie dinner at Delmonico’s it reveals an ancestor standing in entrance of a retailer window promoting “full line groceries” and “jobbers of dry items.”

Studying in regards to the Jewish Gilded Age is like watching that {photograph} develop in a darkroom.

On the one hand the image reveals the anxieties that also hang-out us: antisemitism, inner divides, the excessive value of assimilation. 

It’s additionally a portrait of success. As Benjamin Steiner writes in “Craving to Breathe Free,” “Laborious work, traditions of mutual assist, respect for schooling, centuries of diaspora expertise, structural financial forces tied to capitalism and the truth that most Jews had white skins in a society the place Blacks have been the principal out-group — all enabled Jews by the center of the 20 th century to turn into considered one of America’s most profitable minority teams.”

is editor in chief of the New York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Company. He beforehand served as JTA’s editor in chief and as editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish Information. @SilowCarroll

The views and opinions expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially replicate the views of JTA or its mum or dad firm, 70 Faces Media.