Jewish Life in New York

“New York as the Promised City”

As the Eastern European Jews emigrated to United States, an interesting
phenomena that occurred was the formation of a “transitional culture” (p.
69) which helped the new immigrants adjust, as they were adapting their
traditions to the new environment. United States was a new territory, with
a different class structure, and it provided a different context for the
Jewish tradition. Yet, in this environment, the new Jewish immigrants
formed Jewish communities and aspired to rise above.

The Jewish immigrants formed communities especially on the Lower East Side
in the 1880’s, and in the 1890’s, in the Harlem, East Bronx, and the
Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Boro Park, and Brownsville. There
were also Jewish neighborhoods in Boston, Philadelsphia, Chicago,
Rochester, Cleveland, and Detroit. Furthermore, areas such as the Lower
East Side, North End of Boston, and West Side of Chicago, served as
“fertile ground of cultural sustenance and renewal (p. 70). One of the
impediments that existed in living in New York was that though it was
American’s largest city, it was also crowded. During the 1900’s, the
immigrant population in New York made up 75% of the population,
outnumbering the American-born. The Jewish immigrants who came to New York
from Eastern Europe, in 1870’s, chose to remain on the Lower East Side, a
“twenty-square-block area south of Houston Street and east of the Bowery”
(p. 70). As time progressed, the percentage of Jews living on the Lower
East Side declined, from 75% in 1892, to 50% in 1903, and to 23% in 1916.
There were 542,000 Jews in 1910. The Jewish quarter was so crowded that
Jacob Riis remarked that only in Bombay and Calcutta there were higher
densities. There were also housing problems due to overcrowding in dumbbell
tenements.

The ghetto that was forming on the Lower East Side enabled Jews to get
jobs. In 1910, the garment industry was located here, with 70% of nation’s
women clothing and 40% of men’s clothing. The owners of the factories for
the garment industry were owned by German Jews. In 1897, 60% of New York
Jewish labor force was working in the apparel field, and 75% of the workers
in the industry were Jews. The needle industry operated in three ways,
through the family system, where family members were diving the work,
through outside manufacture, and finally through the sweatshop system.
Though the work was very demanding, with long hours of work, those employed
like this could communicate in their own language with each other and could
perform their religious duties. The Jewish immigrants who arrived between
1899 and 1914 were distinct from other immigrant groups because they
possessed higher industrial skills. They helped expand the garment trade in
New York.  Jews worked in jobs such as hat and cap makers, furriers,
tailors, and milliners. Peddling was also very popular, and pushcart
vendors dreamed of one day being able to open a real store. Other jobs
opened to Jews were in seltzer companies, seltzer being considered the
“worker’s champagne”, in the kosher food industry, as the community needed
kosher butchers and shokhetim, supervisors, in preparation of holiday
foods. There were also jobs in construction industry, the remodeling
business, the garment industry, and the general ethnic economy.

Other issues that immigrants faced were the high rent, which constituted
about 30% of a family’s income, stressful jobs and the struggle to adjust
to the new life, and poverty. There were husbands who would come to the
United States alone, leaving behind their wives and children, without any
support, and in United States they would get a new family and desert their
previous family, their children having to grow up in broken homes. Given
this, these children were at risk. According to the statistics, in 1898
Jews had the lowest rate in the nation in terms of physical violence, but
for “white color crimes, such as fraud, forgery, and embezzlement” the rate
was higher (p. 84). There were also false ideas that Jews would control the
white slave trade and prostitution, which much stemmed from antisemitism.
There existed however, like in any poor districts, “gangsters, pimps, and
whores” (p. 85). 

As opposed to their Eastern European brethren who were more traditional,
the German Jews were more Americanized, having been in the country for a
longer time. The German Jews worried that the ways of the Eastern European
Jews might lead to anti-Semitism, so they sought to Americanize them and
they wanted them to give up their “cultural distinctiveness” (p. 86)