The arrival of these 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 organisation, 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 organised Americanisation programmes in which the new immigrants were instructed in ‘the privileges and duties of American citizenship’. What drove these measures was not only the German Jews’ love of America, but also a dread of the anti-Semitism which they feared the Eastern European Jews would arous… (查看原文)
“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 August Schönberg, 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 took the form of changing one’s first name and giving to one’s children names that sounded reassuringly ‘American’.” (查看原文)
