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    "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews
    "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews
    "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews
    Ebook586 pages9 hours

    "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

    By Stephen Birmingham

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    The New York Times–bestselling history of the Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland who altered the American landscape from New York to Hollywood.

    The wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who swept into New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by way of Ellis Island were not welcomed by the Jews who had arrived decades before. These refugees from czarist Russia and the Polish shtetls who came to America to escape pogroms and persecution were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the “old country” to be accepted by the more refined and already well-established German-Jewish community. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined, and in no time they were moving up from the ghetto tenements of New York’s Lower East Side to make their marks and their fortunes across the country in a variety of fields, from media and popular music to fashion, motion pictures, and even organized crime.
     
    Among the unforgettable personages author Stephen Birmingham profiles are radio pioneer David Sarnoff, makeup mogul Helena Rubinstein, Hollywood tycoons Samuel Goldwyn and Harry Cohn, Broadway composer Irving Berlin, and mobster Meyer Lansky. From the author of “Our Crowd”, comes this treasure trove of fascinating tales and unforgettable “rags-to-riches” success stories that celebrates the indomitable spirit of a unique community.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2015
    ISBN9781504026291
    Author

    Stephen Birmingham

    Stephen Birmingham (1929–2015) was an American author of more than thirty books. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, he graduated from Williams College in 1953 and taught writing at the University of Cincinnati. Birmingham’s work focuses on the upper class in America. He’s written about the African American elite in Certain People and prominent Jewish society in Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York, The Grandees: The Story of America’s Sephardic Elite, and The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews. His work also encompasses several novels including The Auerbach Will, The LeBaron Secret, Shades of Fortune, and The Rothman Scandal, and other non-fiction titles such as California Rich, The Grandes Dames, and Life at the Dakota: New York’s Most Unusual Address.

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    • 3/5
      The writing was quite poor, and the anecdotes chosen were questionable. I did learn some information regarding the Eastern European Jews who came to this country in the 1900's, but most of the stories did not shine much of a light on these particular immigrants.

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    "The Rest of Us" - Stephen Birmingham

    Preface

    It was not my intention when I decided to write this book to write a book that would merely be about rich people. There are some readers, of course, who will argue that this is what the book has become, since our American society inevitably measures success in dollars. But I was actually thinking of America’s Eastern European Jews in terms of another kind of success—a social success, that of a mass migration of millions of people who have managed to become, within the lifespan of a single generation, an essential part of our social fabric and civic landscape.

    The Jewish immigrants who came to America between 1881 and 1915 seemed, at first glance, to be culturally unadaptable: poor, hungry, ill-clothed, often sickly, speaking no English and in some cases illiterate, they were also steeped in a religious tradition that even America’s older-established Jews considered barbaric and bordering upon fanaticism. Politically, they burned with ideas that most Americans had been taught were radical and dangerous. No culture could have seemed more alien to our shores. What could possibly be done with these people, these benighted escapees from a distant, despotic land? How and where would they ever fit in?

    And yet, barely a hundred years later, here they are—as people of prominence and influence in every major American city, and in nearly every walk of life. They have survived anti-Semitism from both Christians and fellow Jews. And they have prospered—in a wide-ranging spectrum of businesses from Wall Street to Hollywood, as well as in science, education, politics, the professions, and the arts—and their prosperity has contributed to the prosperity of America at large. Theirs has been a success story in what the sociologists call assimilation.

    It would be simplistic to say that this is a story that could have happened only in America. America did not offer the Eastern Europeans much of anything to begin with, beyond a chance to be lucky. But, with the inner resources these Jews were possessed of, that chance was enough. Throughout the world, and throughout history, Jews had been punished and persecuted whenever and wherever they seemed to outstep their bounds and threaten, economically, the Christian majority. In fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal, the Catholic monarchs expelled the Jews simply because they had become too important, too necessary. Similar Christian illogic was behind the czarist pogroms of Russia. For a time, for instance, Russian Jews were permitted to be bartenders and innkeepers, and to work in the liquor trade. But when they proved to be good at it, and prospered at it, allegations arose that the Jews were plotting to take over Russia, using vodka as a weapon to befuddle innocent Russian Christian minds, and a harsh reaction followed. Fears that Jews were usurping more than their rightful share of Europe’s money and power were also behind Hitler’s grisly plan to cleanse Europe of its Jews. But in America, to its credit, as the Russian Jews prospered, this did not happen, though there were plenty of mutterings of too much Jewish power from certain quarters. It didn’t happen, perhaps, because we are a nation of immigrants, a nation of gamblers—what greater gamble is there than immigration itself?—and in our hearts we all believe that everyone deserves that chance to be lucky, and this is what we mean when we talk about freedom.

    But when assessing the success of the Eastern European Jews in the United States, it is important to keep matters in perspective, and to remember that for all their financial prosperity no American Jewish families have ever come remotely close to equaling the fortunes of the wealthiest non-Jews. The canard that Jewish money dominates the country is just that. No American Jew has ever amassed a personal fortune equal to that of, say, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, or Howard Hughes. Among contemporary non-Jewish families, the Mellon and du Pont families are each worth between three and five billion dollars. The Getty and Daniel K. Ludwig families are worth between two and three billion, and the Rockefellers between one and two billion.

    By contrast, the richest Jewish family in America is the Pritzker family of Chicago, collectively worth between seven hundred million and one billion dollars. The founding father, Nicholas J. Pritzker, came from Kiev at age nine in 1880, in the first wave of Russian immigrants. The basis of the family fortune is Chicago real estate, which Pritzker began acquiring in the early 1900s when the city was still young and raw. Never sell your land—lease it, was his advice to his sons, and they followed it. Today, the Pritzker real estate holdings are worth, conservatively, half a billion dollars, and other Pritzker investments include Hyatt Hotels, the Cerro-Marmon Corporation, the Hammond Organ Company, the W. F. Hall Printing Company, Continental Airlines, and a number of trucking companies. The Chicago law firm of Pritzker and Pritzker has no clients other than itself, and has not accepted a new client in over forty years because of potential conflicts of interest with the family’s other, far-flung enterprises.

    The second-wealthiest Jewish American family is that of the late Samuel Irving Newhouse of New York, who, with his two sons, built a communications empire worth between six and seven hundred million dollars—twenty-one daily newspapers, five magazines, six television stations, and twenty cable-television systems. The patriarch of this family fortune was born in 1895 on New York’s Lower East Side, the eldest of eight children of Russian and Austrian immigrants. Though Newhouse was in the business of pleasing the reading and viewing public, he had no use for personal publicity. Invited many times to be listed in Who’s Who in America, he refused to fill out the necessary forms. He was, however, intensely devoted to the welfare of his relatives, and was one of the most nepotistic of American employers. At one point, some sixty-four Newhouse sons, brothers, cousins, and in-laws were on the Newhouse payroll. His most visible philanthropic gift has been the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at New York’s Lincoln Center, honoring his wife.

    Next in line in the roster of Eastern European fortunes in America is that of Walter Annenberg and his seven sisters. Since the stock of Triangle Publications—the parent corporation that publishes TV Guide, Seventeen, the Philadelphia Daily News, and the Daily Racing Form, and that owns six television and nine radio stations, plus twenty-seven cable-TV franchises—has long been family held, the size of the Annenberg fortune has long been a matter of guesswork, but is probably in the three- to four-hundred-million-dollar range. To make sure that his private golf course at Sunny lands, his four-hundred-acre estate outside Palm Springs, would always have water, Walter Annenberg bought the local water company. Though Annenberg and his wife are solidly respectable citizens—he a former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, she a former U.S. chief of protocol, and both friends of Presidents Nixon and Reagan—the family fortune is clouded by its founder, Walter’s father, the late Moses L. Annenberg, who made his money from a telegraphic news service for bookie joints that carried information between racetracks across the country. In 1939, the senior Annenberg was convicted of income tax evasion, fined eight million dollars, and sentenced to three years in prison.

    Less well known, perhaps, but on an equal financial footing with the Annenbergs is the Blaustein family of Baltimore. The founding father, Louis Blaustein, was born in Lithuania in 1869, and came to America in his teens. He started out as a kerosene peddler, and devised a then-novel way of transporting fuel—in a steel drum, mounted on wheels, with a spigot at the bottom, the forerunner of the tank truck. Next, he opened America’s first drive-in gas station. Up to then, gasoline had been sold at curbside, a clumsy operation. At the time, motorists had to take a station attendant’s word as to how much gasoline it took to fill their tanks, and more often than not, a station proprietor added a few gallons to the sale for good measure. At Blaustein’s station, this sharp practice was eliminated, and a ten-gallon jar was affixed to the top of each pump with the gallonage marked off on its side, so the motorist could see how much he was getting. It was the forerunner of today’s metered pumps.

    But his most sophisticated innovation was his development of the first special antiknock motor fuel, which revolutionized the gasoline and automobile industry, and made possible the use of the high-compression engine. Blaustein’s gasoline was called then, as it is now, Amoco. Louis Blaustein died in 1937, and his company was taken over by his son, Jacob. In 1954, Jacob Blaustein negotiated the sale of Amoco to Standard Oil of Indiana for stock that made the Blaustein family the largest shareholders in that company. Today, the Blausteins own some 5,250,000 shares of Indiana Standard, worth on a good Wall Street day between $315,000,000 and $400,000,000.

    Interestingly, those Russian Jews who chose to seek their fortunes in the most unorthodox and riskiest ways wound up, though hardly poor, in financial strata considerably below the Pritzkers, Newhouses, Annenbergs, or Blausteins. From a long, charmed life as a mastermind of organized crime, Meyer Lansky died worth between $100,000,000 and $150,000,000. And the flamboyant movie producers from Hollywood’s golden era did even less well, despite the power they once wielded. Perhaps this was because they moved in a world where excessive spending became almost de rigueur, a kind of overhead that had to be figured into the cost of doing business, and where everyone was expected to die broke in the Old Actors’ Home, which Louis B. Mayer had foresightedly helped endow. But Mayer himself, once the highest-salaried individual in the United States, died worth only $10,000,000.

    From such figures, however, it is clear that the Russian-Jewish immigrants, while they did not create fortunes equal to those of the Christians, did not do badly, either. And whereas before the arrival of the Russians, the Germans had been the dominant Jewish economic group, the Russians quickly eclipsed the Germans in both numbers and sheer buying power, a continuing source of hard feelings between the two groups—the German Jews of old money, and the spectacularly arisen Russian nouveaux.

    In some ways, the careers of the Russian-Jewish entrepreneurs I have chosen (rather arbitrarily) to write about, and their twentieth-century success stories, call to mind the sagas of the notorious Christian robber barons of the century before—the first-generation Fricks, Goulds, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Hills, and Rockefellers, all of whom proved that new money and bad manners did not rule each other out. The newer Jewish barons shared many characteristics with their older Christian counterparts—brashness, energy, vast egotism, a certain rapacity, and an almost touching absence of humor. All viewed business as a deadly, fascinating, zero-sum game with only one winner on any field, and a joyful opportunity to outmaneuver the federal government. All were intelligent, even highly so, but few were the least bit intellectual. None seemed to enjoy their money very much when they got it in such huge quantities. Their tastes in pleasure remained simple, fleshly, and inexpensive.

    And so what is different about the twentieth-century American Jewish entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe? Simply put, they were more honest. Almost without exception (and including Meyer Lansky), they believed in giving good weight. They were exceptionally careful about customer opinion. Few Russian Jews have been known to cry, The public be damned!—the curse that was uttered by William Henry Vanderbilt. There is Talmudic tradition in this. The Talmud itself enjoins against sharp practice, and cautions against, say, a Jewish cobbler’s placing his shop in too close proximity to the shop of another Jewish cobbler. The direct competition is to be given elbow room, and space in which to breathe and flourish. Perhaps these ethical standards explain why, for centuries, the ruling courts of Europe preferred to conduct their most important and sensitive business affairs with Jews. They could be trusted.

    This significant difference also helps explain why, on the whole, Russian-Jewish business success in America has been accepted by the rest of the populace with equanimity and respect, without envy or rancor. The robber barons of old were feared and hated by the public, and vilified by the press. Even today the name of Jay Gould is a household word synonymous with ferocious greed and fiscal skulduggery. But who today has anything ill—or anything at all—to say about the business activities of a Nicholas Pritzker or a Louis Blaustein? Their public image has remained benign, if they have any public image at all.

    The collective success stories—against such seeming odds—of the Russian Jews in America also illustrate a point well made by Emerson in The American Scholar: If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. (Disraeli, a Jew, put it a little differently: Everything comes if a man will only wait.) Bringing with them from the Old World so little culture that was usable in the New, that’s what these Jewish men and women had—instincts: instincts that told them to fight and survive.

    Which is not to say that the majority of Eastern European Jews in America were fighters and instinct players. Most had no such ambitions, opportunities, talents, or temptations to conquer. Most made a living, paid their taxes, died, and were buried to the words of the Kaddish. But those who fought, fought well and fairly.

    But, as I have said, this book is not intended to be just about people getting rich. And, impressive as the business successes of such as the Pritzkers, Newhouses, Annenbergs, and Blausteins may be, this is not a book about the rise of these particular families. Rather, it is about the rise of men and women who have intimately affected the way we live and think and view and enjoy ourselves—who have, in the process of their American successes, left their imprint on our culture in terms of the news and entertainment media, the fashion and beauty industries, the arts and music, who have shaped our tastes in our living and even in our drinking habits. The book is inspired, if that is not too pompous a word, by a persistent suggestion. Having written two other books about earlier Jewish migrations to America—the proud Sephardic families who arrived many years before, and whose sons fought in, the American Revolution, and the German-Jewish banking and merchant families who came to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century—I felt it was appropriate to take up the third, and greatest, wave of Jewish immigration, which began in the 1880s and reached flood stage by 1910. When, Russian-Jewish friends kept asking me, are you going to write a book about the rest of us?

    Here it is, and here they are.

    S.B.

    Part One

    BEGINNINGS: 1880–1919

    1

    UPTOWN FIREBRAND

    In the early summer of 1906, a huge and unruly mob of screaming Jewish women and children suddenly descended on a number of public schools on New York’s Lower East Side and began hurling stones and brickbats at the buildings. The riot extended from Rivington Street to Grand Street, and from the Bowery to the East River, with the greatest violence concentrated in the most easterly sections. Windows and door panels of the schoolhouses were smashed, and certainly many frightened teachers—cowering within their classrooms—would have suffered bodily harm if a police task force, wielding nightsticks, had not quickly appeared and been able to quell the mob. It was not immediately clear, furthermore, what the uprising was all about.

    The year 1906 was one of militancy by women. The charismatic Jewish-American anarchist Emma Goldman, then thirty-seven, had just founded her publication, Mother Earth, with her beloved Sasha, Alexander Berkman, who had recently been released from prison for attempting to murder the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in the Homestead Strike of 1892. The London Daily Mail had coined the terms suffragettes to describe women like Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, who were campaigning for woman suffrage. And the Lower East Side was by then no stranger to scenes of social unrest. The rent strikes of 1904 had been particularly disquieting and that same year, in the so-called Children’s Strike, more than a hundred young women, many in adolescence, most of them Jewish, who had been earning pennies for piecework in a local paper-box factory, marched to protest a pay cut of ten percent. The irony was that their employer was one Mr. Cohen, a Jew.

    Meanwhile, from the trickle of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe—Russia, Poland, Rumania, Austria-Hungary—that had begun in 1881, there had grown a flood. By 1906, nearly two million Jews—roughly a third of the Jews of Eastern Europe—had left their homes. Over ninety percent of these had come to the United States, and most of them had settled in New York City, where Ellis Island was attempting to process as many as fifteen thousand immigrants a day. The Lower East Side was bursting at its seams. Yet none of these turbulent forces seemed immediately to account for the violent outburst of the women and children against the East Side public schools.

    When the dust had settled, however, it turned out that a rumor had somehow billowed in the ghetto to the effect that doctors were murdering children in the schools by slashing their throats and then burying their bodies in the schoolyards. And blame for the incident—later labeled the Adenoids Riot—was laid at the doorstep of a much beleaguered lady educator named Julia Richman, the district school superintendent, who was herself Jewish.

    In fact, it was a case of a Julia Richman program that had backfired. Among other innovations, Miss Richman had introduced seasonal smallpox vaccinations for East Side children. There had been much resistance to this at first, from immigrant parents who couldn’t understand why their children were being pricked with needles, which resulted in sore arms. But eventually the vaccination program had been accepted. In 1906, however, at one school—P.S. 100 at Broome and Cannon streets—the vaccinating physicians had discovered that a number of children suffered from adenoids, or swollen lymph-node tissue at the back of the throat, which could be removed by simple surgery. The principal of P.S. 100, one Miss A. E. Simpson, had sent home carefully worded notes to the parents of the affected children, explaining that, if possible, parents should have their own doctors perform the operation. If not, Miss Simpson explained, Board of Health physicians would do the work at the schools at no cost, and if they wished this, parents were asked to sign forms and releases, giving the board their permission. Unable to read English, not knowing what they were signing, but doing their best to comply with strange new American customs and procedures, many parents had dutifully signed the forms. Thus it was the routine snipping of adenoids that had led to the throat-slashing stories.

    The Christian press, typically, blamed excitable, ignorant Jews, fearing Russian massacres here, knowing nothing of American sanitary ideas and the supervision exercised over school children by the Health Board, for the riots. The New York Tribune, among others, praised the police for their vigorous application of the slats to the most convenient section of the nearest ‘Yiddisher.’ But for the Lower East Siders it was another case of unwanted interference from Miss Richman.

    Julia Richman was, in the somewhat disparaging phrase of the day, an uptown do-gooder. She followed in the noble tradition of women like Lillian Wald, a German-Jewish young woman who had come from a family of comfortable means, had gone into nursing, and, in 1893, had gone to the Lower East Side to devote her life to the healing of the sick and needy. With the financial backing of the German-Jewish philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff, Lillian Wald had established the Henry Street Settlement, where thousands of immigrant Jews were welcomed after their long journey in steerage, where they were fed, housed, and cared for—deloused, dusted off, taught rudimentary English, and otherwise eased through the shock of entering a new culture.

    A number of prominent uptown Christians had also become involved, as volunteers, with settlement house work. Just as it had become fashionable for every New York lady to support a favorite charity, a favorite settlement house was adopted—the Henry Street, the University Settlement, and so on. The aim of the settlement houses was to form a bridge between the old and new worlds—to instill within an immigrant population a sense of personal purpose and spiritual fulfillment in American democracy. It was true that the settlement houses tended to concentrate their efforts on children and young people. There was a strong feeling that children were often held back in the Americanization process by immigrant parents who were too fixed in their Old World ways to adapt to a different society, or too timid or shy to try. But if children could be persuaded to influence parents, the theory went, the parents too might be persuaded to see the light. There were, however, no overt efforts to Christianize children, but only attempts to make them feel comfortable in a predominantly Christian American world. The settlement houses provided courses and lectures on everything from American politics to American sports, from manners to modes of dress. They were, in other words, trying to supplement and augment what Julia Richman was doing in her schools.

    And in many ways they were successful. But there were still stirrings of unrest and distrust among these incursions by Christians and Jews who were different among the Jews of the Lower East Side.

    Lillian Wald—in her off-duty hours, at least, when not teaching tenement dwellers how to unstop drains, dispose of garbage, deal with rats, or swallow unpleasant-tasting medicines—affected a rather grand and patrician manner, favoring large flowered hats and face veils. Still, she came to be much loved on the Lower East Side, and as her legend grew she was transformed into something of a latter-day Florence Nightingale. Had there been candidates for sainthood in the Jewish faith, she would have been one of them. Not so Miss Richman, whose goals—helping the new immigrant to assimilate—were essentially the same. It was probably the difference in the two women’s personalities that accounted for the different ways in which their activities were regarded. Lillian Wald was soothing, motherly, comforting, a hand-holder. Julia Richman was a whip-cracker, with no patience for sloth and inefficiency, a woman of easily elicited opinions, with no hesitancy about saying exactly what was on her mind, on almost any subject.

    And of course the two women’s fields of expertise set them apart, from the point of view of the people they were both trying to serve. Lillian Wald’s concerns were more concrete and immediate—healing the ailments of the human body. Julia Richman’s bailiwick was more subtle and elusive—Americanizing the immigrant mind.

    Like Lillian Wald, Julia Richman grew up in a world of moderate affluence. Her family, who had emigrated from Germany two generations earlier, had prospered to the point where they were solid city burghers. Her father owned a paint and glazing business and had, among other things, supplied all the original glass for the old Cooper Institute, a particularly lucrative contract. The family was also very ancestor-proud, and could trace itself back to 1604, to the city of Prague, in what was then Bohemia, and Julia liked to note that her family tree was studded with illustrious physicians, teachers, and rabbis.

    She had been born October 12, 1855, the middle child of five, in New York City, where the family lived at 156 Seventh Avenue, in the heart of the then-fashionable Chelsea district. She had attended P.S. 50 and then, after the family’s move to suburban Long Island, Huntington High School. At Huntington, though she got excellent grades, she was known as something of a tomboy and a show-off. With her long skirts pinned between her legs, she would climb tall trees and swing from their branches. She was also a bit of a troublemaker, and was famous for her imperious manner and quick temper. At age twelve she discussed the future with a young contemporary, and the following exchange is reported to have taken place:

    The friend: Julia, I’m pretty, and my father is rich. When I finish high school I’ll marry a rich man who will take care of me.

    Julia (indignantly): Well, I am not pretty, my father isn’t rich, and I’m not going to marry, but before I die all New York will know my name!

    Growing up in a rigidly disciplinarian Jewish household, Julia and her sisters were instructed in the domestic arts by an exceptionally demanding mother. Each girl, for example, was required to take her turn at setting the table for family dinners—no small chore, considering the fact that the dinners consisted of six courses and involved seven place settings. Once, after setting the table as instructed, Julia called her mother into the dining room to inspect the results. Mrs. Richman circled the big table slowly, checking each item. All the silver and glassware, china and napkins were properly placed, but Julia’s mother spotted one discrepancy. The lace tablecloth hung a bit lower on one side of the table than the other. Julia, said her mother, take everything off the table, put it all back in the drawers and cupboards where it came from, straighten the cloth and start over. Julia did as she was told. It was a lesson, she liked to recall in later years, that had taught her the importance of exactness.

    She was more independent, however, when it came to choosing a career. Much to her parents’ dismay, she announced, at age fourteen, that she intended to become a schoolteacher. Her Victorian father was particularly distressed at this decision, since teaching inevitably meant spinsterhood; in those days, a teacher’s pregnancy was grounds for dismissal. But Julia prevailed, and, at fifteen, she enrolled at New York’s Normal College.* She graduated in 1872, after completing what was the standard two-year teaching course, but because she was not yet seventeen years old—the minimum age for a teacher then in New York—her license to teach had to be withheld until her birthday.

    Julia Richman’s first teaching assignment was in a classroom full of boys, where, since many of her pupils were her own age and older, she had certain difficulties instilling the kind of discipline she had in mind. Soon, however, she was transferred to girls’ classes, and here she did considerably better. Presently it was being said of Julia Richman that she was born to command, and as her reputation grew so did her executive ability—and, no doubt, her ego. She began moving steadily upward in the public school system—first to vice-principal of P.S. 73 and then, in 1884, to principal of the girls’ department. She was not yet thirty, and she was the youngest principal in the city’s history, as well as one of the first women—and the only Jewish woman—principals.

    She was already a woman to be reckoned with. As an extracurricular task, she had volunteered to teach the Sabbath school at her family’s temple, Emanu-El. Here she found herself obliged to deliver religious instruction to one particularly obstreperous young man. She took her problem to her supervisor, recommending that the youth be suspended or punished. Her supervisor wrung his hands and said to her, "But we can’t do anything about him. Don’t you realize he’s the son of one of our richest members?" Miss Richman handed in her resignation on the spot.

    In 1903, Julia Richman was appointed district superintendent of schools, and here were more firsts. She was the first woman school superintendent in Manhattan, again one of the youngest of either sex, and again the first Jewish woman to hold such an exalted position in the city’s school system. Her prediction was beginning to come true, and all New York was beginning to know her name.

    Miss Richman was now regarded with no small amount of awe in educational circles. As a result, she was given the almost unprecedented option of selecting her own school district to supervise, and after considering several others, she made a choice that was as audacious as it was dramatic and newsworthy. She chose the most difficult and challenging district of all: the Lower East Side, the ghetto of Jewish poverty, where older and tougher male superintendents had dreaded being assigned.

    Here, under the mantle of her stewardship, would fall the education of some twenty-three thousand children, along with the supervision of six hundred teachers, and the running of fourteen different day and night schools. The children, meanwhile, were of all ages—from six-year-olds to men in their twenties and thirties who were just starting to do the equivalent of first-grade work. What made teaching on the Lower East Side especially difficult, of course, was that most of the pupils could not speak English.

    Immediately, Julia Richman began to impose upon her district her own personal style. She was on early advocate of progressive education—a concept that was then quite new—but her vision went beyond that. She saw the combined role of her schools as extending farther than the limits of the classroom walls, and out into the East Side community at large. She believed that her schools’ influence should be stretched out into the crowded streets and tenements and little shops. She believed that the daily lives of the East Side poor—not just the children but their parents and grandparents as well—should be embraced by the school system. In addition to academic subjects, she decided that her pupils would be instructed in such matters as hygiene, sanitation, table manners and etiquette, the importance of learning American customs, the American legal system, and civil obedience. She even—though the notion shocked her fellow educators whenever she brought it up—toyed with the idea of introducing sex education into the curriculum.

    She swept aside everything and anything that smacked of pro forma ritual. It is much easier, she once said, and so much prettier to teach the oath of allegiance to the flag than to teach a community to keep the fire escapes free from encumbrances. At the same time, she exercised her passion for exactness, and her surprise visits of inspection to her schools were dreaded throughout the district. Her beady eye caught everything—improperly washed blackboards, broken pieces of chalk, unsharpened pencils. One of her staff moaned, Every time she visits a school it is like Yom Kippur!—the Day of Atonement.

    Naturally, with a role as broad and sweeping as the one she assumed for herself, a woman such as Julia Richman was bound to make enemies. And make them she did. But along the path of her career she had also managed to make friends in high places. Under the umbrella of her superintendency, for example, she had gathered the New York Police Department, and one of her targets became community vice. A particular bane was a group of young men who, in the idiom of the day, were called cadets (pimps) and who were charged with being in the business of leading young girls into lives of degradation. The cadets and other young hoodlums hung out in and around Seward Park, and Miss Richman was soon spearheading a cleanup of that area. In at least one Richman-inspired raid, two hundred fifty truants from her schools were arrested, along with a quota of cadets. At the same time, she busied herself with other good works. She rented a house in the ghetto and had it converted into a social center for her teachers. She made an incursion into Lillian Wald’s territory, and supervised the conversion of an old ferryboat into a floating sanitarium for consumptives, who were believed to profit from fresh salt air. In her spare time, she helped found the National Council of Jewish Women, an organization whose original purpose was to protect young Jewish girls from white slavers, who, lying in wait for them at the docks, had their own plans for degradation. She was also the first president of the Young Women’s Hebrew Alliance, and for a number of years she edited a magazine called Helpful Thoughts. Helpful Thoughts was directed at the children of Jewish immigrants, and devoted its contents to what its title promised—helpful thoughts by which children could be Americanized and could assimilate as quickly as possible. She lectured tirelessly, and wrote magazine articles on her educational theories. None other than Louis Marshall—the foremost Jewish lawyer in New York, who, along with Jacob Schiff, was the leader of the German-Jewish community—had praised Julia Richman for her years of acknowledged usefulness.

    Mr. Marshall, however, was very much an outside observer, and had spent no time on the receiving end of Miss Richman’s usefulness. To those who had, she seemed more like a martinet. By 1906, the year of the Adenoids Riot, Miss Richman was very much an authority figure on the Lower East Side, and for this she was in no small way resented. With her clipped, precise speech, her imposing bosom, her carefully marcelled mane of dark red hair, in her spotless white gloves and expensively tailored if understated suits, she was also a commanding physical presence. At fifty-one, she was definitely in her prime, if not at the height of her popularity, and in the wake of the riot there were allegations that somehow her school district could have prevented the misunderstanding; as there had been in the past, there were a number of noisy demands for her replacement or resignation. But Miss Richman moved on to another useful—if unpopular—project: free eye examinations for all her pupils and, if necessary, free corrective eyeglasses. (Jewish immigrants were particularly fearful of eye examinations; those who failed to pass them at Ellis Island had been refused entry.) As usual, she ignored her critics.

    At the time, Julia Richman was living at 330 Central Park West on the Upper West Side—a neighborhood that was directly antipodal to her school district—and her address was certainly a part of her problem. (By contrast, Lillian Wald had settled in a fifth-floor walk-up on Jefferson Street, asking only for the luxury of a private bathtub.) Where Miss Richman lived was also a ghetto of sorts, but it was a ghetto of affluence. The western flank of Central Park and the side streets leading off it had become a wealthy German-Jewish residential district. The development of the passenger elevator had led to the building of a number of tall, imposing apartment houses on the Upper West Side with grand-sounding names, such as the Chatsworth, the Langham, the Dorilton, and the Ansonia, and the apartments they offered were usually spacious with high ceilings, commanding views of the city in all directions, and many servants’ rooms. New York’s Christian upper crust might still prefer their Upper East Side town houses, but the city’s German-Jewish elite—historically leery of investing in real estate—tended to choose apartment living. (It was not until many years later that luxury apartment houses were built on the Upper East Side.)

    At addresses like Julia Richman’s lived families who had been poor immigrants themselves a little more than a generation earlier, but who now wore top hats and frock coats to their Wall Street offices. In the years during and after the Civil War, former rural foot peddlers had made the great transition into banking, retailing, and manufacturing. Their names were Guggenheim, Lehman, Straus, Sachs, Altman, Loeb, and Seligman. For years, the little knot of families had intermarried with one another, and by the early 1900s they composed a tight network of cousins and double cousins. Within the group, of course, there were stratifications. The German Jews of Frankfurt origin considered themselves superior to the Jews of Hamburg, but the Jews of Frankfurt and Hamburg considered themselves superior to those of Munich, or anywhere in the south. The Seligmans thought of themselves as better than the Strauses, since the Seligmans had become international bankers while the Strauses, of Macy’s, had remained in trade. The Guggenheims, who were Swiss Jews, were a problem. They were the richest of the crowd, but they were considered socially somewhat gauche. Julia Richman’s family belonged very definitely to this small set, which called itself the One Hundred, to distinguish itself from the Christian Four Hundred of Mrs. William Astor. Julia’s sisters, furthermore, had all made proper in-the-group marriages—Addie Richman to an Altman, whose family ran what was considered to be New York’s finest department store, and Bertha Richman to a Proskauer, whose family included prominent lawyers.

    By 1906, the dividing line between uptown (German) Jews and Lower East Side (Eastern European) Jews had become the source of much hard feeling, and Julia Richman was, in both manner and appearance, very uptown. Her uptownness was assumed to account for her heavy emphasis on discipline and correctness, and for her high-handed habit of involving herself in matters—such as the police force—that had previously been considered out of the jurisdiction of the schools. Lillian Wald at least seemed sympathetic to the East Siders’ most pressing needs. Julia Richman seemed more interested in getting the East Siders to conform to her own exacting standards, in imposing her own toplofty values, in changing centuries-old ways of thinking, seeing, living, being.

    To complicate matters further, the Lower East Side had become something of a fashionable cause, or Cause, in New York City. Rich Christian ladies, such as Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont and Miss Anne Morgan (sister of J. P.), made sable-clad forays into the Lower East Side to dispense their Christian charity to the poor, deserving Jews. These Lady Bountifuls were distrusted and suspected of being missionaries bent on conversion, and it was hard to distinguish Julia Richman, in her stone marten scarves, from one of these.

    It was also suspected that her efforts at uplifting were—like those of her family and social set—self-serving, and based essentially on a bad case of embarrassment. The Eastern European Jews were especially sensitive on this point, and with good reason. Julia Richman’s values were seen as those of the wealthy few, and she seemed to be trying to force-feed her notions to the hungry masses, who, in their own eyes, already had perfectly acceptable standards of their own, which they saw no need to change. Marching into their midst with her pronouncements on the importance of clean fingernails and lessons on how to curtsy, this uptown woman not only came from enemy territory, she also symbolized capitalism, a force that traditionally oppressed rather than uplifted the poor. She lived on a street that was already being called the Jewish Fifth Avenue.

    On top of everything else, she represented a form of Judaism that the Eastern Europeans did not fully understand and were not ready to accept. She actually practiced a religion very different from theirs. As early as 1845, thirty-three young German-Jewish immigrants who had arrived in Manhattan just a few years before banded together to establish a Reform congregation, which they named Emanu-El. The very term Reform, of course, indicated that these Germans felt that there was something about traditional Judaism that needed updating and correcting. Reform had had its seeds in Germany, but had come into full flower in the United States, where it was regarded—by the German-American Jews, at least—as an essential step toward assimilation into the American culture.

    Reform Judaism was touted as the dominion of reason over blind and bigoted faith, but it really represented the new dominion of America over the Old World. Among the revisions advocated by Reform was that houses of worship no longer be called synagogues, but instead be known as temples. The principal day of worship was shifted from Saturday to Sunday, to conform with the religious habits of the American majority. The use of Hebrew was virtually dropped from the order of service, in favor of English. Keeping kosher households was deemed both archaic and impractical—as well as un-American. (The great American leader of the Reform movement, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, had shocked the Jews of Cincinnati by putting on a banquet at which shrimp and crawfish were among the delicacies offered.) In fact, inside the new Reform temples, with their pulpits and pews and chandeliers, where hatted women worshiped alongside unhatted men and not in separate curtained galleries, the atmosphere was often indistinguishable from that of an American Christian church. The strictly Orthodox, kosher-keeping Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Hungarians viewed all these developments as examples—sinister and shocking ones—of how quickly the faith could erode in America if one were not ever watchful.

    In Russia, rabbis had long warned their congregations that Westernization of the religion would spell its undoing. Steeped in centuries of Orthodoxy, the Men of the Book had spent their days bowed at the eastern walls of their synagogues, endlessly studying the Talmud, dissecting its exhortations, preparing commentaries on the Holy Word, and commentaries upon commentaries—often at the expense of any other kind of labor or scholarship. In most Eastern European congregations, the reading of secular books had been banned—for how could the words of mere men be allowed to compete with the Word of God? From this had grown the belief, which the Eastern Europeans had brought with them to America, that work other than Talmudic scholarship was unworthy of the Jew, that poverty was the pious Jew’s lot, that pursuit of Mammon was unrighteous. That the uptown German-Jewish businessmen had not only grown rich, but had also tailored their religion to fit more easily into the Christian mode in the process, seemed sheer apostasy. To the Germans, who saw themselves as Americanized, this attitude merely seemed unenlightened—backward, ignorant.

    Simple statistics also offered an explanation for the increasing East-West, German-Russian mutual antipathy. In 1870, the number of Jews in New York City had been estimated at eighty thousand, or less than nine percent of the city’s population. With the exception of a handful of crusty, aristocratic, and ingeniously interrelated Sephardic families who had been living in the city since the mid-seventeenth century, most of these families had come originally from Germany—driven out not so much by religious persecution (though there was some of that) as by taxation and the threat of conscription into the German armies. Since their numbers were small, their arrival in New York had been a nonevent, and their presence in the predominantly Christian city went relatively unnoticed. They lived very quietly, almost deliberately so, preferring inconspicuousness to ostentation. They worked hard and, in the process, had gained a reputation for probity. As bankers, they had established valuable international connections with such powerful British and European firms as Hambro’s and the House of Rothschild. During the Civil War, while amassing considerable fortunes of their own, they had helped establish the Union’s credit overseas at a time when President Lincoln’s treasury desperately needed it.

    As merchants, the Strauses of Macy’s, the Rosenwalds of Sears, Roebuck, and the Altmans of Altman’s had provided the city with high-quality merchandise at fair prices. As publishers, the related Ochses and Sulzbergers offered a newspaper that was responsible, even essential. As families, they kept to themselves, and if they had any desire to storm the gates of Mrs. Astor’s Christian circle they were too proud to show it. (Indeed, the German Jews often left the impression that theirs was the more difficult social sphere to storm.) They projected just the opposite wish—to leave the established structure of Christian society exactly as they had found it. The German Jews, in other words, were assimilationists only up to a point, and had prudently not tried to push beyond that point. It might be added, too, that many of the German Jews were blond, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed. In appearance, they did not stand out against the prevailing look of the population. They flowed pleasantly—not with it, but alongside it.

    And yet, by 1906, nearly ninety thousand Jews were arriving in New York City every year, most of them from Russia and Poland. (Because the Russians and the Poles seemed indistinguishable, all these immigrants were grouped as Russians.) Now the Jewish population of the city stood at close to a million, or roughly twenty-five percent of the total population, and by 1915 there would be nearly a million and a half, or twenty-eight percent. In sheer numbers, the Jews of New York seemed to be overtaking the non-Jewish population. And, massed together on the Lower East Side, they were nothing if not conspicuous.

    They arrived looking like bindle stiffs—hobos with their worldly possessions, slung over their shoulders in gunny sacks. The men were swarthy skinned, often bearded and side-curled. They were poor, and looked it: ill-clothed, ill-shod, often sickly. They were nearly always in need of baths and fumigation—and smelled it. They looked, and were, frightened—and what is more alarming than a look of terror in a stranger’s eyes? There was

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