Heritage: Civilization and the Jews #107; No. 107; The Golden Land

<v Narrator>Major funding for this program has been provided by the Charles H. <v Narrator>Revson Foundation, Petrie Stores Corporation and the National <v Narrator>Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding has been provided by the following <v Narrator>contributors. <v Narrator>A complete donor list is available at WNET. <v Narrator>[theme music plays] <v Man 1>She rose up from the waters of New York Harbor in 1886,

<v Man 1>like some ancient goddess presiding silently over the gateway to a continent. <v Woman 1>Here at our seawashed sunset gates, shall stand a mighty woman <v Woman 1>with a torch. <v Woman 1>And her name, Mother of Exiles. <v Woman 1>Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to <v Woman 1>breathe free. <v Woman 1>The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. <v Narrator 2>These are the words of the poet Emma Lazarus. <v Narrator 2>It was no accident that as a Jew, she could voice the dreams of immigrants <v Narrator 2>of every faith, of every nationality who came to this land. <v Narrator 2>America was different, large enough and broad enough <v Narrator 2>to allow for all beliefs.

<v Narrator 2>Rich enough in natural resources to answer the needs of all who came. <v Narrator 2>America was different. <v Narrator 2>It promised those who came that what they might have been was less important <v Narrator 2>than what they might become. <v Narrator 2>[seagulls chirping] On an island in New York Harbor, stand a cluster of abandoned <v Narrator 2>government buildings. <v Narrator 2>The nearby docks at empty ferry slips speak of a time when thousands <v Narrator 2>of men, women and children arrived here each day and first set <v Narrator 2>foot on American soil. <v Narrator 2>Eighty years ago, millions of immigrants passed through these halls and crossed <v Narrator 2>the threshold to a new life in a new land.

<v Narrator 2>Past the Statue of Liberty they came, and onto Ellis Island in the closing <v Narrator 2>years of the 19th century. <v Narrator 2>By the thousands, by the millions. <v Narrator 2>And also one by one. <v Narrator 2>The poor, the disenfranchised, the hopeful, the adventurous, the persecuted, <v Narrator 2>the oppressed. [music plays] <v Narrator 2>One by one from Italy, Ireland, Germany and Russia. <v Narrator 2>And among them, nearly two million Jews from Eastern Europe. <v Narrator 2>To the tapestry which was America, more than 100 ethnic groups <v Narrator 2>would bring their special threads of color and culture. <v Narrator 2>It was not only the size and the richness of the continent to which they came that <v Narrator 2>made America different. <v Narrator 2>It was what they brought with them and how they interacted with each other that made <v Narrator 2>America different. <v Narrator 2>America was a nation peopled by immigrants.

<v Narrator 2>A nation whose very foundations had been laid by immigrant settlers as early <v Narrator 2>as the 16th century. <v Speaker>Many of the first settlers in America had crossed the Atlantic, seeking <v Speaker>a refuge from political and religious intolerance in Europe. <v Speaker>The Atlantic was a road of escape open to anyone who could raise passage. <v Speaker>It was also a commercial highway. <v Speaker>Among those involved in Atlantic shipping and trade were descendants of those Jews <v Speaker>who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century. <v Speaker>In 16 54, a small group of Portuguese Jews sailing <v Speaker>from Brazil to Amsterdam were blown off course and stranded <v Speaker>without money. <v Speaker>Twenty three Jewish men, women and children made their way to the Dutch colony <v Speaker>of New Amsterdam, hoping to find in this place the toleration

<v Speaker>of their kinsmen enjoyed in Amsterdam itself. <v Speaker>The governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, a man of many prejudices, <v Speaker>wrote to his superiors in Holland. <v Speaker>We pray that the deceitful race be not allowed to infect this new colony, <v Speaker>giving them liberty, we cannot refuse the Lutherans and Papists. <v Speaker>But Jews were deeply involved in Dutch commerce, Stuyvesant <v Speaker>superiors were sympathetic but firm. <v Speaker>We have decided that the Portuguese Jews may travel and trade too, and <v Speaker>in uniform and live and remain there. <v Speaker>You will now govern yourself accordingly. <v Speaker>New Amsterdam later to become New York remains a place where <v Speaker>Jews might settle. But in other places, there was little toleration. <v Speaker>Many of America's first colonists had brought with them the prejudices of

<v Speaker>Europe. In Massachusetts, the Puritans forbade <v Speaker>other forms of worship than their own. <v Speaker>In Virginia, the Anglican Church was state supported and heresy <v Speaker>was a crime. <v Speaker>But other colonies were run as commercial ventures and anyone was welcome <v Speaker>who could develop their land or contribute to their trade. <v Speaker>In the course of the 18th century, a few Jews came to the new continent <v Speaker>as ship owners and merchants. <v Speaker>They settled in the port cities of Savannah, Charleston, Philadelphia, <v Speaker>New Port and New York. <v Speaker>In these cities, it mattered little that they were Jews. <v Speaker>Everyone was a foreigner. <v Speaker>To that extent, everyone was alike. <v Speaker>They became a small but integral part of colonial society.

<v Speaker>But the very freedom of America that so benefited individuals was <v Speaker>dangerous to the preservation of a Jewish community. <v Speaker>The Jews who came to America left behind them all the institutions that <v Speaker>had daily reinforced their identity as Jews, the rabbis, <v Speaker>the Jewish teachers, the religious schools in America. <v Speaker>They were on their own. <v Speaker>Without the leadership and structure of a separate Jewish community, <v Speaker>they were free to set aside their Jewishness if they wished. <v Speaker>And many of them did. And even if they wanted to remain Jews, <v Speaker>with whom could they pray or socialize or most importantly, <v Speaker>marry? There were so few Jews that it was almost impossible to <v Speaker>live a Jewish life in colonial America. <v Speaker>What kept the Jewish community alive in these early years was a continuing

<v Speaker>but small infusion of new Jewish immigrants from abroad. <v Speaker>By the 18th century, the bustling ports of the new world were a vital <v Speaker>link in the trade routes of the British Empire. <v Speaker>But British rule and British taxes soon came to be resented by many <v Speaker>of the prosperous colonists. <v Speaker>In these quiet streets of Philadelphia, a storm of protests was unleashed. <v Speaker>Delegates from all the colonies gathered and in July of 1776 <v Speaker>proclaimed their defiance of British rule. <v Speaker>The forces of the British Empire were marshaled against the revolt. <v Speaker>For five years, the struggle continued. <v Speaker>The fragile union of American forces was constantly on the verge of collapse,

<v Speaker>but it held for long enough to defeat the British. <v Speaker>Here in this room in 1787, delegates gathered to <v Speaker>write a contract that would bind the states together for their mutual defense. <v Speaker>For this contract, the Constitution to be accepted by all. <v Speaker>It had to be amended by a set of declarations known as the Bill of Rights. <v Speaker>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or <v Speaker>prohibiting the free exercise thereof. <v Speaker>To bring together the diversity of interests and peoples. <v Speaker>That was America toleration had been made a fundamental principle of <v Speaker>American law. <v Speaker>In 1790, George Washington visited this synagogue in Newport, Rhode <v Speaker>Island. To its congregation, he addressed a letter that <v Speaker>has become a classic statement of religious freedom in America.

<v Speaker>The citizens of the United States of America all possess alike liberty <v Speaker>of conscience. For happily the government of the United States, <v Speaker>which gives to bigotry, no sanction to persecution, no assistance, <v Speaker>requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves <v Speaker>as good citizens. <v Speaker>May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue <v Speaker>to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants, while everyone <v Speaker>shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall <v Speaker>be none to make him afraid. <v Speaker>The letter is signed G Washington. <v Speaker>In the towns and villages of a growing nation, different religious groups <v Speaker>were now living side by side. <v Speaker>For Jews, a small fraction of the population.

<v Speaker>Only a few thousand in number were fully integrated in the nation, <v Speaker>joining even in the government of the land. <v Speaker>The Constitution guarantees the equal rights of all citizens, though it could <v Speaker>not do away with their prejudices. <v Speaker>Mordecai Emmanuel Noah, a Jewish playwright and a prominent politician, <v Speaker>was appointed sheriff of New York in 1822. <v Speaker>What a pity, wrote one New Yorker, that Christians ought to be hung by a Jew. <v Speaker>What a pity, replied Sheriff Noah, that Christians should have to be hung. <v Speaker>In 1870, a man named. <v Speaker>Honest steam to propel river boats along the great waterways that <v Speaker>led to the interior of the country.

<v Speaker>Within five years, the adventurists were being advised of regular service <v Speaker>from the eastern seaboard into the wilderness of Ohio and Kentucky. <v Speaker>The news of opportunities on the American frontier reached as far as Europe. <v Speaker>Before long, settlers were arriving by the thousands. <v Speaker>In the 1850s, spurred by political turmoil in Europe, a million <v Speaker>came from the German lands alone. <v Speaker>And among them, more than 100000 German speaking Jews. <v Speaker>It was the beginning of a substantial Jewish presence in America. <v Speaker>Leaving behind the close knit Jewish communities of Europe, these Jews <v Speaker>discovered in the backwoods of this continent a solitary way of life <v Speaker>unlike any they had ever known.

<v Speaker>This frontier region where thousands of remote farmsteads, hundreds <v Speaker>of isolated settlements that had only one tie to the outside world. <v Speaker>The itinerant peddler. <v Speaker>Many of the young Jewish men who came to America, a horse and a cart full <v Speaker>of goods, were an early step on the road toward fortune. <v Speaker>The Pedlar was a welcome guest on the frontier. <v Speaker>He brought U.S. He brought goods. <v Speaker>He brought the necessities. The Pioneer family could not make for itself, <v Speaker>but frontier life was often perplexing for the Jewish immigrant. <v Speaker>From the diary of a peddler in the 1840s. <v Speaker>We have left our friends and acquaintances, our relatives and our parents, <v Speaker>our language and our customs.

<v Speaker>Only to sell our wares in the wild places of America. <v Speaker>And isolated farmhouses and tiny hamlets. <v Speaker>Leading such a life. None of us is able to observe the smallest commandment. <v Speaker>On Sunday, every farmer urges me to attend church. <v Speaker>A Jewish peddler striving to survive. <v Speaker>I found it difficult to avoid working on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. <v Speaker>Difficult to observe the dietary laws of his people. <v Speaker>On the American continent, with its frontier ways and scattered settlements, <v Speaker>the immigrants had to take life as he founded. <v Speaker>He had to leave behind his old language, his old customs and experiences. <v Speaker>He had to become a pioneer among other pioneers. <v Speaker>It started with a 100 pound pack with peddlers who trudged mile after <v Speaker>weary mile. <v Speaker>In time, the pack gave way to the one horse wagon. <v Speaker>If he was fortunate, the Jewish peddler saved and eventually opened

<v Speaker>a general store. <v Speaker>The general store frequently became the focus of a permanent settlement. <v Speaker>Because he was an early settler. <v Speaker>The storekeeper frequently became the sheriff or mayor or leading citizen <v Speaker>of the town. <v Speaker>Other Jews might join him there and form a small Jewish congregation. <v Speaker>The German Jews became part and parcel of the epic opening of the <v Speaker>American West. <v Speaker>Jewish merchants were among many immigrants who contributed in these years

<v Speaker>to the development of a new American. <v Speaker>Communities all over the land were under construction to keep pace with a growing <v Speaker>population. <v Speaker>By 1860, in the swampy District of Columbia, an ambitious <v Speaker>program of construction was underway. <v Speaker>With boundless energy and enthusiasm, Americans dreamed of One Nation <v Speaker>reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. <v Speaker>But this land full of hope and ambition was also a land deeply <v Speaker>divided. <v Speaker>An intractable quarrel between North and South over slavery and states <v Speaker>rights was tearing the country apart. <v Speaker>1861.

<v Speaker>Immigrants arriving at New York, Atlanta or Baltimore were enlisted <v Speaker>to fight on the battlefields of the Civil War to give their lives <v Speaker>for a cause they barely understood. <v Speaker>It was a bloody war, a heartbreaking war. <v Speaker>A war between brothers. <v Speaker>Some 7000 Jews fought in the Union Army, at least 3000 <v Speaker>fought for the Confederacy. <v Speaker>For four years, the war dragged on until in 1865, <v Speaker>the union forces at last prevail. <v Speaker>More than half a million Americans died in the civil war more than in any <v Speaker>other war America has ever fought. <v Speaker>It was of great cost that the United States were reunited.

<v Speaker>The needs of war have catapulted the industrial north into an exclusive <v Speaker>economic and commercial expansion. <v Speaker>New factories created new jobs by the thousands. <v Speaker>Wanted a million men good wages and the <v Speaker>goods came in ever increasing numbers. <v Speaker>The factories were humming and the railroads reaching outward to the frontier <v Speaker>and beyond.

<v Speaker>Over the next 40 years, the continents were spanned by a network of iron <v Speaker>rails. <v Speaker>It was a time of brash individualism. <v Speaker>Off the discovery and exploitation of seemingly endless natural resources. <v Speaker>It was a time of untrammeled and unregulated speculation. <v Speaker>Out of the two amounts of unbridled competition, there emerged <v Speaker>a new society. <v Speaker>So rich and powerful. <v Speaker>Andrew Carnegie, the son of a Scottish weaver. <v Speaker>His steelworks would make him the richest man in the world.

<v Speaker>Jay Gould, a country store clerk from APHA New York State who rose <v Speaker>to control many of the nation's railroads. <v Speaker>John D Rockefeller, an oil man from Cleveland whose father <v Speaker>had been a petty tradesman. <v Speaker>They moved with the frontier. <v Speaker>The physical frontier and the frontiers of opportunity and ingenuity. <v Speaker>Wherever they might like. <v Speaker>In Leadville, Colorado, Meyer Guggenheim's, a Jewish immigrant from Switzerland, <v Speaker>purchased sight unseen two silver mines with money he had made as <v Speaker>a peddler in the South. <v Speaker>The silver mines were flooded. <v Speaker>He popped them out and discovered to his disappointment that they contained little <v Speaker>silver, but a low grade of copper or instead.

<v Speaker>With his seven sons, he developed refining processes that would <v Speaker>make that all profitable. <v Speaker>In doing so, they established a foundation for the entire American copper <v Speaker>industry. <v Speaker>From remote mining centers and cattle towns of the West, livestock and minerals <v Speaker>were shipped by rail to the east in return k manufactured goods <v Speaker>to fill the shelves of general stores in towns and villages throughout the nation. <v Speaker>As the economy grew, as towns became small cities. <v Speaker>The Jewish shopkeepers prospered. <v Speaker>General stores became department stores. <v Speaker>Macy's, Saks, Bam, bocas, Gimbels, Bloomingdales, Sears,

<v Speaker>Roebuck throughout the country, most department stores were owned and <v Speaker>created by Jews. <v Speaker>By the 1870s, a new group of immigrants began to come from Germany <v Speaker>attracted by the flourishing economy. <v Speaker>They were German Jews whose families in Europe were involved in finance <v Speaker>and banking. <v Speaker>Jewish businessmen turned to these Jewish financiers for the loans and investment <v Speaker>capital. They could not easily obtain from gentile bankers. <v Speaker>German Jewish immigrants. The Loeb's and Coon's and Shifts Seligman's <v Speaker>joined in the task of financing a nation and shared richly <v Speaker>in the fruits of their labors. <v Speaker>The Jews of German origin were toward outward appearances, fully integrated <v Speaker>in American life.

<v Speaker>They had left behind the Jewish communal life of Europe to live as individuals <v Speaker>in this new land. <v Speaker>But they wished to preserve the intimacy and fellowship of the past <v Speaker>to preserve their religious heritage. <v Speaker>Their rabbis, all of whom were trained in Europe, struggles to help them <v Speaker>find an American expression of Jewishness. <v Speaker>Throughout America, the German Jews built synagogues of great beauty <v Speaker>like this one, Binay yashwardhan in Cincinnati. <v Speaker>But Jews in America were not certain what the content of their Judaism ought to be. <v Speaker>There were no central authorities to define the rules of Jewish life. <v Speaker>All the Jews wanted their synagogues to be American houses of worship. <v Speaker>But practices varied widely from congregation to congregation. <v Speaker>In some synagogue's men and women were allowed to sit together so that families

<v Speaker>would not be separated. <v Speaker>Some argued that rabbis should deliver weekly sermons. <v Speaker>For others, it was enough that some English be used in their prayers. <v Speaker>The most extreme wanted worship on Sunday instead of the traditional Saturday. <v Speaker>The Jewish community was engaged in an ongoing debate. <v Speaker>Among those who sought to bring the community together was Rabbi Isaac <v Speaker>M. Weiss of Cincinnati. <v Speaker>In 1873, he created a union of American Hebrew congregations. <v Speaker>And shortly thereafter, a seminary where American rabbis could be trained. <v Speaker>In so doing, he laid the foundations of an American Jewish movement called <v Speaker>reform. <v Speaker>Ouais had hoped to unite all American Jews in a single movement, <v Speaker>but there was too much diversity of opinion. <v Speaker>Too much disagreement.

<v Speaker>When in 1885, reform rabbis publicly renounced all Jewish <v Speaker>dietary laws or laws of dress and outwhat custom, more traditional <v Speaker>rabbis were aghast. <v Speaker>They set about organizing a seminary of their own. <v Speaker>Rabbis trained at this new institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary, <v Speaker>would eventually establish the American movement known as Conservative Judaism. <v Speaker>Whatever approach they took, the Jews of this country were defining a Judaism <v Speaker>that was distinctively American. <v Speaker>Germans, English, Irish, Jews. <v Speaker>On the streets of New York, as on the streets of other American cities, <v Speaker>immigrants from many lands had joined in creating an American way of life. <v Speaker>The stream of immigrants into this world was unending.

<v Speaker>By the 1870s, as many as 300000 arrived each year. <v Speaker>In the 1880s, the stream became a torrent. <v Narrator 2>[music playing] Between the years 1880 and 1924, more than <v Narrator 2>25,000,000 people would land at the ports of America. <v Narrator 2>They would change the face of its cities. <v Narrator 2>They would change its culture. <v Narrator 2>They came from Italy and Germany, from Russia and from Poland in <v Narrator 2>search of opportunities in the industry of a rapidly growing American. <v Narrator 2>Among them were nearly 2,000,000 Jews from Eastern Europe. <v Narrator 2>These Jews came to America fleeing pogroms and poverty. <v Narrator 2>Whole families were uprooted, leaving behind their old lives, hoping

<v Narrator 2>for a new and better life in America. <v Narrator 2>The place of arrival for most starting in 1892 <v Narrator 2>was Ellis Island. <v Narrator 2>They were examined, questioned, and tagged. <v Narrator 2>Submitted to a process they could not understand. <v Narrator 2>Thousands every day. <v Narrator 2>You could arrive at Ellis Island with one name and leave with another, <v Narrator 2>particularly if your name was hard to spell or your accent difficult for an American <v Narrator 2>to understand. <v Narrator 2>You might be detained for medical or other reasons, not knowing if you would be allowed <v Narrator 2>into the country. <v Narrator 2>But the majority were admitted and placed on ferries bound for the island <v Narrator 2>of Manhattan. <v Speaker>Where am I going? What will I do? In Grodner, I was at least someone in the store, but in

<v Speaker>America without language, with only a bit of education. <v Speaker>For thousands crossing from Ellis Island to Manhattan was only the first stage of <v Speaker>the journey that took them to Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh or rather <v Speaker>American cities and towns that many Jewish immigrants landed <v Speaker>in Lower Manhattan and made their way by foot to the crowded streets <v Speaker>of New York's Lower East Side. <v Speaker>It was congested beyond belief, wracked by illness and exhaustion. <v Speaker>Impoverished beyond description. <v Speaker>The first thing the immigrant had to do was to find a place to live. <v Speaker>Conditions were appalling. <v Speaker>Four, five and six to a room. <v Speaker>No place to wash.

<v Speaker>Parents and children crowded together, uncertain of their future. <v Speaker>For father, there was nothing else to do. <v Speaker>Be a peddler and no profession. <v Speaker>He didn't know the language. <v Speaker>What else could he do? <v Speaker>If the immigrant was lucky, he earned enough to feed his children. <v Speaker>To help, our mother took in boarders, she made all our clothes. <v Speaker>She wore blocks to reach a place when bread was a half cent less. <v Speaker>She collected boxes in old wood burning stone. <v Speaker>Her hands became hardened. <v Speaker>Yet we children always had clean and whole clothing. <v Speaker>Clothing for most Jewish immigrants. <v Speaker>It was more than something to wear. <v Speaker>It was the lifeblood of existence. <v Speaker>Its manufacturer was a Jewish business. <v Speaker>German Jews provided the fabric.

<v Speaker>Immigrants took it home and sold it into garments. <v Speaker>Every apartment, a factory. <v Speaker>Father, mother and children, the workers. <v Speaker>Seven days a week. <v Speaker>From dawn far into the night, there was no escape from work. <v Speaker>Children were raised on cotton fabric amidst dust and lint. <v Speaker>For some of the burdens of that, life led to tragedy will descend disease <v Speaker>to the breakup of homes, to desertions and sometimes through violence <v Speaker>and crime. <v Speaker>Among those who set out to help this troubled community was the journalist <v Speaker>Abraham Khan. <v Speaker>In the newspaper, he created the Jewish Daily Forward. <v Speaker>He spoke to the people in their own language, Yiddish, answering <v Speaker>their questions, giving practical advice.

<v Speaker>Werethey editor We have been in the country two years, and my father, <v Speaker>who is a frail man, is the only one working to support the whole <v Speaker>family. <v Speaker>My dearest friends of the forward, I have been jobless for six months <v Speaker>now. If I had known it would be so bitter for me here, I wouldn't have come. <v Speaker>I beg you to. My husband deserted me and died. <v Speaker>Three small children. <v Speaker>It breaks my heart, but I have come to the conclusion you. <v Speaker>Mr. Editor of the Forward. <v Speaker>I read The Troubles of Family Life in your letter column every day very <v Speaker>attentively. <v Speaker>But my own troubles are so great, so enormous that I <v Speaker>ask you right on the spot. <v Speaker>Help! <v Speaker>From the moment of their arrival, the immigrants look to each other for help. <v Speaker>First to relatives or to townspeople from the old country. <v Speaker>People from the same towns form groups known as Lance Moosh often <v Speaker>were among their old neighbors, they could find fellowship or help in times of need.

<v Speaker>They were fraternal lodges, beneficent and free loan societies, burial societies, <v Speaker>and in makeshift quarters, hundreds of small orthodox congregations where immigrants <v Speaker>came to worship and to study. <v Speaker>Most important of all, they came to be among their old townspeople. <v Speaker>In small shoes, as they were called, the orthodox traditions of Eastern Europe <v Speaker>were preserved. <v Speaker>For some among the immigrants, the synagogue was the surviving link to the life <v Speaker>they had left behind. <v Speaker>But many of these immigrants, like the German Jews before them, found it difficult <v Speaker>to hold on to the traditional ways. <v Speaker>Some Orthodox Jews believed that a new set of standards were needed in this new land,

<v Speaker>flexible standards. Yet faithful to the spirit of the Eastern European <v Speaker>tradition. <v Speaker>By 1915, a new generation of Orthodox rabbis was appearing <v Speaker>familiar with the world of general history, literature and science while <v Speaker>preserving the traditional knowledge of Torah and Talmud. <v Speaker>It was a development that would ultimately lead to the creation of Yeshiva University. <v Speaker>A new kind of American Judaism was being established American orthodoxy <v Speaker>out of the materials of their European past came a vigorous new expression <v Speaker>of Jewish culture. <v Speaker>In cafes and meeting halls of the Lower East Side, there were free lectures, <v Speaker>free concerts and for a nickel. <v Speaker>That marvelous escape from the wretchedness of daily life. <v Speaker>The Yiddish theater mania. <v Speaker>Mean, I'm only going to make it a good thing.

<v Speaker>I mean, you know, you may never will. <v Speaker>I'm all I'm all I'm all going to land these guys. <v Speaker>Seen. <v Speaker>No, no, no longer. <v Speaker>Many of the greatest Yiddish plays still performed throughout the world. <v Speaker>Wherever the language is spoken, were written on the streets of New York. <v Speaker>I mean, if <v Speaker>one of my friends got to go out. <v Speaker>Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum <v Speaker>dum <v Speaker>dum dum <v Speaker>dum dum dum dum dum dum. <v Speaker>Slinks, hoping to get .05.

<v Speaker>You must leave me, I should be your <v Speaker>best shot at. <v Speaker>Despite machines. <v Speaker>To many Americans, this Yiddish culture was a strange and unwelcome arrival <v Speaker>on the shores of the United States. <v Speaker>Many Jews of German origin looked askance at the immigrants from Eastern Europe. <v Speaker>The affluent German Jews, those long established in America, were embarrassed <v Speaker>by the culture of the dress, the language and the poverty of the newcomers. <v Speaker>They sought to teach them how to become Americans instead.

<v Speaker>Jacob Schiff with others, established the Henry Street settlement and <v Speaker>the Educational Alliance of the Lower East Side, where new arrivals could puzzle <v Speaker>out the intricacies of the English language. <v Speaker>There were free public libraries and public schools where by the thousands, <v Speaker>the children of immigrants found a path to achievement in American life. <v Speaker>If the fathers and mothers had been immigrants, children would be Americans. <v Speaker>All the immigrants who arrived in these years, Italians, Irish, Scandinavians, <v Speaker>Poles, Hungarians, Jews, all were struggling to find their way in the <v Speaker>new country. <v Speaker>In towns and villages across America, you're off to. <v Speaker>Crowds gathered in celebration of the Fourth of July. <v Speaker>They gathered to celebrate a country they knew and understood, not a land

<v Speaker>inhabited by aliens. <v Speaker>Not a land whose city streets were filled with a babble of incomprehensible <v Speaker>tongues. <v Speaker>For many Americans, the immigrant world seemed un-American, a danger <v Speaker>to the old fashioned values of American life. <v Speaker>As immigration increased, the reaction to it grew violent. <v Speaker>Newspapers and editorials led Linfa attack. <v Speaker>These people are not Americans, but the very scum of Europe, long haired, wild <v Speaker>eyed, bad smelling, atheistic foreign wretches who never did an honest <v Speaker>hour's work in their lives. <v Speaker>There were calls for a new patriotism for an America <v Speaker>cleansed of foreign elements. <v Speaker>Since the 1880s, there have been repeated attempts to stop immigration. <v Speaker>But America was growing and its appetite for new goods and the products of

<v Speaker>industry seemed insatiable. <v Speaker>The need of American industrialists for cheap foreign labor was not to <v Speaker>be denied all over industrialized America. <v Speaker>Factory workers were recent immigrants. <v Speaker>There was no Western frontier left for new immigrants to settle the wilderness <v Speaker>they faced was one of slums and noise of industry and <v Speaker>grinding labor. <v Speaker>Beginning in the last decades of the 19th century, workers throughout <v Speaker>America began to organize themselves into unions. <v Speaker>A generation of working men and women endured bitter strikes, privation <v Speaker>and even violence as they struggled to gain some control over their own destiny. <v Speaker>At the beginning of the 20th century, more than one hundred and fifty thousand Jews

<v Speaker>worked in the clothing and district of New York's Lower East Side. <v Speaker>It had grown beyond the confines of the immigrants homes. <v Speaker>Thousands now worked in factories and lofts, cutting sewing again. <v Speaker>The quarters were cramped. There was no ventilation in the heat of summer. <v Speaker>The hours were long and hard. <v Speaker>The conditions are hazardous. <v Speaker>In November of 1990, 30000 shirtwaist makers, <v Speaker>most of them Jewish women in their teens or early 20s, walked off their jobs. <v Speaker>The protest was spontaneous. <v Speaker>It brought the industry to a standstill. <v Speaker>Five months later, sixty thousand cloak makers went on strike. <v Speaker>It came to be known as the Great Revolt of 1910. <v Speaker>The Jewish workers were joining together to demand decent working conditions,

<v Speaker>fair pay to demand that they be accepted as Americans with <v Speaker>an equal right to secure and dignified life. <v Speaker>On March the 25th, 1911, at the Triangle Shirtwaist <v Speaker>Company near Washington Square. <v Speaker>A fire broke out on the 11th floor. <v Speaker>By the time the fire department arrived, the blaze was out of control. <v Speaker>An eyewitness reported the firemen were helpless. <v Speaker>Ladders reached only to the seventh floor. <v Speaker>The fireman stood about and stared, that's one woman after another fell from <v Speaker>the burning building and below. <v Speaker>Screaming and howling, thousands of laborers from surrounding factories. <v Speaker>One hundred and seventy five workers lost their lives. <v Speaker>Most of them young Jewish, anti-Italian. <v Speaker>The grief of the community was almost too much to bear.

<v Speaker>The tragedy of the fire aroused widespread sympathy, a groundswell <v Speaker>of public concern would ultimately lead to laws governing the sanitary <v Speaker>conditions and safety of the workplace. <v Speaker>But it was not only sympathy that the immigrant workers earned in these <v Speaker>troubled years. Out of the cloak makers strike of 1910 <v Speaker>came a document called the Protocol of Peace, an agreement <v Speaker>unprecedented on the American scene drafted by Louis Brandeis, <v Speaker>who would soon become the first Jewish member of the United States Supreme Court. <v Speaker>It established procedures of outside arbitration, a pattern that <v Speaker>would become a model solution to all future labor conflicts in America. <v Speaker>Meanwhile, however, American attitudes toward immigrants and all things <v Speaker>foreign were being complicated by conflicts of greater scale <v Speaker>far beyond America's shores.

<v Speaker>Nineteen forty. <v Speaker>Shipping across the Atlantic was threatened, and in 1917, <v Speaker>America reluctantly was drawn into the war. <v Speaker>The strains of war weakened to the fabric of European society. <v Speaker>In Russia, the Zionist empire began to crumble. <v Speaker>In the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks led by late in season <v Speaker>power. They saw their victory as the first of a series <v Speaker>of revolutions that would sweep the world and overthrow established governments. <v Speaker>Everyone. <v Speaker>An uneasy order descended upon the Western nations. <v Speaker>The cost of the war had been great in its wake. <v Speaker>There was unemployment and labor unrest. <v Speaker>The international economy was in chaos. <v Speaker>In America, the end of the war brought the end of a fragile truce between

<v Speaker>unions and management. <v Speaker>Within a year. <v Speaker>There were no fewer than three thousand six hundred strikes. <v Speaker>They were suppressed by troops, National Guards, private police forces. <v Speaker>Many Americans consider the strikes a sign that recent immigrants were crossing <v Speaker>against America, that a communist revolution was at hand. <v Speaker>In 1919, there was a rash of terrorist bombings. <v Speaker>One of them almost taking the life of the United States Attorney General, <v Speaker>Mitchell Palmer. <v Speaker>He became convinced that the red menace was real. <v Speaker>He organized a series of raids. <v Speaker>Thousands of immigrants were arrested, beaten, confined without trial. <v Speaker>Anyone with a Russian sounding name or suspected of being a revolutionary.

<v Speaker>Many were deported. <v Speaker>In these anxious years, the Ku Klux Klan grew rapidly in both <v Speaker>north and south. It's going to fight back the immigrants <v Speaker>to control the Negroes, the Catholics, the Jews. <v Speaker>In this atmosphere of hatred and fear, the Congress of the United States <v Speaker>in 1924 voted to slam shut America's open door. <v Speaker>The mass migrations that have given the country its special character were <v Speaker>over. <v Speaker>The new law was designed to halt immigration from Europe's poorest regions.

<v Speaker>The new Americans who had come from those lands. <v Speaker>Italians, Jews and others felt that they themselves were being attacked. <v Speaker>For the Jews in America, it was a time of confusion. <v Speaker>They had every reason to believe that they or their children might find success and <v Speaker>acceptance in America, but they also had reason to fear. <v Speaker>There were many Americans who resented the success of anyone who was not white, <v Speaker>Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and in the 1920s, it seemed that intolerance <v Speaker>might gain the upper hand. <v Speaker>Intolerance had been growing since the last quarter of the 19th century, <v Speaker>successful German Jews had been excluded from hotels, resorts, <v Speaker>clubs and private schools, but they were not content to remain silent in <v Speaker>the face of discrimination. <v Speaker>By the beginning of the 20th century, they established organizations dedicated <v Speaker>not only to the protection of their rights, but through the defense of Jewish communities

<v Speaker>in other lands as well. Organizations such as the American Jewish Committee <v Speaker>and the Anti-Defamation League of Binay Brith. <v Speaker>At the end of the First World War, concern for the welfare of Jewish refugees <v Speaker>in Europe, large growing numbers to support the call for the establishment <v Speaker>of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. <v Speaker>The American Jewish Congress, Hadassah, the Zionist Organization <v Speaker>of America and other Jewish institutions began to play an important <v Speaker>role in international Jewish affairs. <v Speaker>As anti-Semitism threatened in many lands, even in America <v Speaker>in the 1920s, German and East European Jews alike faced <v Speaker>a resurgence of American style intolerance. <v Speaker>It was expressed through discrimination in housing and employment, through admissions <v Speaker>quotas at universities and through exclusion from the elite social institutions <v Speaker>of America. But elite society was only a small

<v Speaker>part of the American world. <v Speaker>Twenty five million immigrants have come to the cities of America since 1880. <v Speaker>They had changed the flavor of its culture, the accent of its speech, its <v Speaker>address, its humor and its sense of self. <v Speaker>America's popular culture was new and vital. <v Speaker>It drew on the energies, the experiences, the dreams of many people. <v Speaker>Out of the Jewish neighborhoods of New York, Chicago and dozens of other American <v Speaker>cities came a bursting forth of talent and achievement in <v Speaker>every phase of American life.

<v Speaker>Mine and me <v Speaker>dig it, oh. <v Speaker>Oh, nothing but. <v Speaker>These immigrants and children of immigrants eagerly discovered new opportunities <v Speaker>in technologies and art forms that had never existed before, where prejudice <v Speaker>was no barrier. <v Speaker>Most of America's film pioneers would choose. <v Speaker>Louis B man, Samuel Goldwyn. <v Speaker>Off Zucco, many of the stars were Jews. <v Speaker>Emmanuel Goldenburg, known as Edward G. <v Speaker>Robinson. <v Speaker>Milton hestill book Melvyn Douglas. <v Speaker>Theodosia Goodman, Fit Bomber.

<v Speaker>The Jews have come to America with dreams of a new life. <v Speaker>They went on to reflect and to shape in the films they made the dreams of all <v Speaker>America. <v Speaker>But the majority of the Jews took other paths into the mainstream of American <v Speaker>life. <v Speaker>If their fathers had been students of the Talmud given to poring over the intricacies <v Speaker>of religious law, the children took their love of study and discussion and gave <v Speaker>it new form. <v Speaker>Through the colleges and universities of America, they made their way into <v Speaker>new careers. <v Speaker>In law, in medicine, in the sciences, in government and <v Speaker>in teaching. <v Speaker>The impoverished Jews who had come from Eastern Europe had passed through <v Speaker>the crowded slums of America's cities.

<v Speaker>And within two generations had reached a place of distinction in American <v Speaker>life. <v Speaker>Among the many Jews who figured prominently in these years were <v Speaker>Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, justices of the United <v Speaker>States Supreme Court. <v Speaker>Bernard Baruch, statesman and adviser to presidents. <v Speaker>The writers Gertrude Stein, George S. <v Speaker>Kaufman and Clifford Odets. <v Speaker>Composers Aaron Copeland, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. <v Speaker>And there were authors. Beyond Count. <v Speaker>What made all this possible was the very character of American civilization,

<v Speaker>above all its diversity. <v Speaker>It was not a uniform culture. <v Speaker>As in England, France, Poland, Germany, if you were different in America, <v Speaker>so were many other people. <v Speaker>The Jews were just one group among many who joined this new world, <v Speaker>and in the rich and diverse society of American Jews, found a kind <v Speaker>of acceptance they had never experienced anywhere else. <v Narrator 2>[music plays] The Jews became an integral and creative part of American civilization. <v Narrator 2>With all others who would come to these shores, the Jews have helped to shape <v Narrator 2>and had themselves been shaped by the America they call the Golden <v Narrator 2>Land. <v Narrator 2>These Jews who have joined and prospered in America were soon to witness <v Narrator 2>in the 1930s and 1940s the terrors of a gathering storm

<v Narrator 2>that would burst upon their brethren in Europe. [music plays] <v Narrator>Major funding for this program has been provided by the Charles H.

<v Narrator>Revson Foundation, Petrie Stores Corporation and the National <v Narrator>Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding has been provided by the following <v Narrator>contributors. <v Narrator>A complete donor list is available at WNET. <v Narrator>Abba Eban has written a companion book to this series, which is published by Summit <v Narrator>Books and is available in bookstores and libraries. <v Narrator>[PBS theme plays]