A Childhood in Jewish New Orleans

In New York, the starring German Jews did not respond to the Grand Union Hotel incidental by appealing to the humanitarian impulses of Gentiles, successful the mode of Lazard Kahn’s missive to Nast. Instead, galore of them came to spot their caller and unexpected troubles arsenic the effect of the wide emigration of Eastern European Jews which was conscionable getting nether way. Before 1880, determination were less than 3 100 1000 Jews successful the United States, astir of them German. By 1920, arsenic galore arsenic 3 cardinal Jews had arrived, overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe. They weren’t conscionable acold much galore than the German Jews, they were much observant, much concentrated successful municipality slums, and overmuch poorer. The mode to combat anti-Jewish prejudice, galore German Jews thought, would beryllium to bash thing astir them.

In 1891, 3 salient German Jews—­a Schiff, a Seligman, and a Straus—­asked President Benjamin Harrison to unit the tsar to follow much lenient policies toward the Jews, and to stanch the rising incidence of pogroms, truthful that Russian Jews wouldn’t consciousness they had to immigrate to the United States. Another German ­Jewish task was the Galveston Plan (1907-14), which aimed to steer Jewish immigrants distant from New York and different large cities, wherever determination were highly disposable Jewish slums. A 3rd inaugural was establishing a Yiddish-­language paper called Die Yiddische Welt, oregon the Jewish World, arsenic an alternate to the unmannerly homegrown press, overmuch of which was scandalous and socialist, astatine slightest to the German Jews’ mode of thinking. Still different was backing the aboriginal Jewish cultivation settlements successful Palestine for Eastern European Jewish refugees, which would supply a destination that wasn’t New York.

Surely determination was compassion successful these efforts—­maybe adjacent the enhanced compassion you would consciousness for radical who were similar you successful immoderate way. But it didn’t widen to existent mingling. As a lad of the German Jewish financier Felix Warburg said astir his father, who contributed oregon raised millions to the assistance of Jews successful distress, “He disliked astir everything astir the Jews but their problems.”

In France successful the precocious nineteenth century, a Jewish Army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was enactment connected proceedings connected mendacious charges of treason. Dreyfus’s sensational lawsuit turned him into a nationalist enemy, and made it wide that France, the tract of 1 of the earliest programs of Jewish emancipation, was not affable to Jews, either. Theodor Herzl, the writer who founded the modern Zionist movement, said helium was converted by the Dreyfus lawsuit from a typically assimilated, secular Western European Jew into idiosyncratic who believed that the clip had travel to state the Diaspora a nonaccomplishment and make a Jewish nation. This did not appeal, to accidental the least, to German Jews successful America. No thought was much threatening to our sub-tribe astatine the crook of the twentieth period than Zionism. We wanted to blend in, to beryllium unobtrusive, to beryllium accepted. Zionism was loud, insistent, separatist, tribal. Zionism called attraction to the unsettling world that millions of Jews successful Europe wanted to leave—­many, nary doubt, for America alternatively than for Palestine. Reform Judaism’s slogan was that we were a religion, not a race. Zionism was a secular question rooted successful Jewish identity: race, not religion.

Just arsenic America’s carriage-trade institutions were systematically excluding Jews, the German Jews’ Reform institutions excluded oregon expelled Zionists. Kaufmann Kohler, a German-born Reform rabbi, became the president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College successful Cincinnati successful 1903. He purged Zionists from its faculty; helium besides barred a salient Zionist from speaking astatine H.U.C. In 1918, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the nationalist Reform enactment organization, issued a connection criticizing the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s authoritative connection of enactment for a Jewish homeland successful Palestine. “The perfect of the Jew is not the constitution of a Jewish state—not the re-assertion of Jewish nationality which has agelong been outgrown,” the connection said. A fewer years aft that, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which severely restricted emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (and barred immigrants from Asia). This meant that Jews would person a hard clip coming to the U.S.; Jewish migration to Palestine swelled.

In 1936, Julian Feibelman arrived arsenic the caller rabbi astatine New Orleans’s Temple Sinai. He coiled up holding the occupation for thirty-­one years, and truthful being the main nonstop spiritual authorization of some Father’s puerility and mine. In 1938, helium joined 1 of the Lemanns, which besides made him, to me, Cousin Julian. Julian had grown up successful Jackson, Mississippi, erstwhile it was a municipality of astir 7 1000 people, without paved streets. His father, who, similar astir of the different Jews successful town, owned a store, had the household devour matzos during Passover and instrumentality the time disconnected connected Yom Kippur, but that was the grade of their observance. They besides celebrated Christmas and Easter arsenic secular holidays.