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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Change history
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.
Bibliography
Alroey, Gur. 2016. Zionism Without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Bar-Yosef, Eitan, and Nadia Valman, eds. 2009. The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Berman, Lila Corwin. 2015. Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race and Religion in Postwar Detroit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel. 1998. Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Borochov, Ber. 1944. Philosophical Writings (L’she’alat tziyon v’teritoriya) (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim.
Ciment, James. 2013. Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It. New York: Hill and Wang.
Clegg, Claude. 2004. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press.
Cohen, Steven. 1989. The Dimensions of American Jewish Liberalism. New York: American Jewish Committee.
Dollinger, Marc. 2000. Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Etkes. 1978. Compulsory Education as a Crossroads in the History of the Haskalah Movement in Russia (Parashat hahaskalah mita’am v’ha tmura b’ma’amad tnuat hahaskalah b’russiya) (Hebrew). Zion 43: 202–216.
Feingold, Henry. 2013. American Jewish Political Culture and the Liberal Persuasion. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Foner, Eric. 1998. The Story of American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Frankel, Jonathan. 1981. Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews 1862–1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Friedman, Murray. 2005. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gleason, Philip. 1992. Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Goldstein, Eric. 2006. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Heymann, Michael, ed. 1970. The Uganda Controversy. Vol. 1. Jerusalem: Israel Universities.
Higham, John. 1955. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Hollinger, David. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books.
Jick, Leon. 1976. The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Kallen, Horace. Democracy Versus the Melting Pot. Nation 100 (1905, February 18):190–194 and, (1915, February 25): 217–220.
Krugman, Paul. 2009. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Kuzmack, Linda Gordon. 1990. Woman’s Cause: The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States, 1881–1993. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Lazarus, Emma. 1882. Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death, and Other Poems. In The American Hebrew. New York.
———. 1987. An Epistle to the Hebrews. New York: Jewish Historical Society of New York.
Lederhendler, Eli. 1989. The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McGown, John. 2007. American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Mintz, Mattiyahu. 1976. Ber Borochov: Circle One, 1900–1906 (Hama’agal harishon) (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press.
Moore, Deborah Dash. 1981. At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews. New York: Columbia University Press.
Nahshon, Edna. 2006. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Nathans, Benjamin. 2004. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Noah, Timothy. 2012. The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality and What We Can Do About It. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Penkower, Monty Noam. 2004. The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning Point in Jewish History. Modern Judaism 24 (3): 187–225.
Philipson, David, ed. 1915. Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi: Life and Writings. New York: Bloch.
Podhoretz, Norman. 2010. Why are Jews Liberal. New York: Vintage.
Raisanovsky, Nicholas. 1959. Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rochelson, Meri-Jane. 2008. A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Rosen, Jeffrey. 2016. Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rovner, Adam. 2014. In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel. New York: University Press.
Ruben, Bruce. 2011. Max Lilienthal: The Making of the American Rabbinate. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Sarna, Jonathan. 1999. The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture. Jewish Social Studies 5 (Fall-Winter): 52–79.
———. 2004. American Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Schor, Esther. 2006. Emma Lazarus. New York: Schocken Books.
Shilony, Zvi. Jewish National Fund and Settlement in Eretz-Israel, 1903–1914 (Hakeren hakayemet le-Yisra’el veha-hityashvut ha-Tsiyonit 1903–1914) (Hebrew). Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi, 1990.
Shumsky, Neil. 1975. Zangwill’s The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage. American Quarterly 27: 29–41.
Silver, M. M. 2006. Rabbi Max Lilienthal: From ‘Compulsory Education’ to the Separation of Religion and State. (Harav maks liliyental: mihaskalah mita’am l’hafrada ben dat v’medina) (Hebrew). Zion 71: 343–372.
———.. 2016. Who Can Beat the Big Money? (Me yachol l’kesef hagadol) (Hebrew). Hevel Modi’in: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir.
Stanislawski, Michael. 1981. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.
Stanley, Timothy, and Jonathan Bell. 2012. Making Sense of American Liberalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Sundiata, Ibrahim. 2003. Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery: 1914–1940. Durham: Duke University Press.
Udelson, Joseph H. 1990. Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Urofsky, Melvin. 2009. Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books.
Vital, David. 1975. The Origins of Zionism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wiebe, Robert H. 1967. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang.
Wisse, Ruth. 1992. If I am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews. New York: Free Press.
Wohlgelernter, Maurice. 1944. Israel Zangwill: A Study. New York: Columbia University Press.
Zangwill, Israel. 1909. The Melting Pot. New York: Macmillan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-48239-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48240-4
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)