The twentieth century shattered every precedent for good and evil. World War II and the Nazi campaign to destroy Europe's Jews brought a continent to its nadir. In the war's aftermath, Jewish Holocaust survivors were by far the most desperate of Europe's refugees. Here, in the midst of mass trauma, an uncommon chapter of decency slowly emerged: the publication of the Talmud by the U.S. Army for Holocaust survivors in Displaced Persons camps. Today this Talmud in nineteen volumes numbers among the American Jewish Historical Society's most prized possessions. Recently, Michael Feldberg, Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society, launched a traveling exhibit covering this singular event which appeared first in the first floor exhibition space of the Center for Jewish History.

Upon liberation in 1945, in Germany alone 85,000 homeless Jews, having been catagorized according to nationality, were crowded together with eight million non-Jewish refugees -- Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians. Frequently, they were subjected to anti-Semitic assaults. Within months that number was tripled by a constant flow of survivors from Communist countries stretching from Poland to Soviet Asia. All of these Jews were housed indiscriminately in barracks together with the very people who had collaborated with the Nazis in killing their co-religionists.

At first the American occupying army didn't know what to make of the Jewish survivors. All too typical was the reaction of General George Patton who described Jewish DP's at a prayer service "as the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen." Patton's insensitivity notwithstanding, President Truman dispatched Earl G. Harrison, a former U.S. Commissioner of Immigration to conduct an inquiry into the needs of Jewish refugees. Harrison was accompanied by Dr. Joseph Schwartz, European director of the Joint Distribution Committee.

What Harrison and Schwartz uncovered was so horrifying that it shocked President Truman into ordering General Eisenhower to make the plight of the Jewish survivors a priority. In particular, he emphasized the importance of getting the Jews out of concentration camps and into decent housing - if necessary in housing requisitioned from the German civilian population. Truman added: "I know you will agree with me that we have a particular responsibility toward these victims of persecution and tyranny who are in our zone. We must make clear to the German people that we thoroughly abhor the Nazi policies of hatred and persecution. We have no better opportunity to demonstrate this than by the manner in which we ourselves actually treat the survivors remaining in Germany."

The U.S. Army could do only so much. The heaviest burdon fell on the shoulders of the Joint, short for the Joint Distribution Committee. Dr. Joseph Schwartz was in charge. Under his direction two thousand Joint personnel provided meals for 250,000 survivors. In addition, they operated one hundred fourteen schools and kindergartens, seventy four religious schools, and twenty four clinics, hospitals and orphanages in DP camps in Germany and Austria alone. It was a Jewish Marshall Plan run entirely on voluntary contributions.

Through the combined efforts of religious and Jewish army chaplains, the re-establishment of yeshivas and talmud torahs in the DP camps ensured the centrality of learning to the Jewish ethos. The Foehrenwald yeshiva served as the administrative headquarters of all the talmudic academies in the American zone. In 1946 a delegation of DP rabbis approached General Joseph McNarney, the commander of the American zone, with the urgent request of publishing a Talmud, most of them in Europe having been destroyed by the Nazis. Without much persuasion needed, General McNarney was quick to concur and the American military set to work.. Scare paper and ink supplies were found and the Carl Winter Print Plant in Heidelberg was requisitioned. Two sets of the Talmud were brought directly from New York to serve as prototypes as no complete edition of the Talmud could be found in the American zone.

The dedication printed in each of the 19 volumes reads as follows:

This edition of the Talmud is dedicated to the United States Army. The Army played a major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation, and their defeat of Hitler bore the major burden of sustaining the DPs of the Jewish faith. This special edition of the Talmud, published in the very land where, but a short time ago, everything Jewish and of Jewish inspiration was anathema, will remain a symbol of the indestructibility of the Torah. The Jewish DPs will never forget the generous impulses and the unprecedented humanitarianism of the American Forces, to whom they owe so much.

The publication of the Survivor's Talmud was an historical first: never before had a national government seen fit to publish this glorious culmination of Jewish learning. For the Holocaust survivors housed in the DP camps who had been deprived of every vestige of life and learning, the Survivors' Talmud proved to be a scholarly blessing.

America's first Yiddish newspapers, the Yiddishe tseitung and the Yiddishe post, served as a prequel to the saga of mass transatlantic migration of Eastern Europe Jews to the United States--one of history's most significant population shifts. Both publications made their debut in New York in 1870, when American Jewry was still largely German inflected. Early examples of the American Yiddish press along with many of the first books published in Yiddish in America number among the rarest and most valued holdings of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The tseitung and the post catered by and large to a relatively small semi-educated and unskilled readership, immigrants for whom the newspaper, indeed for whom journalism of any kind, was a novelty.

It would still take twenty years before Yiddish would begin to make its mark on the American landscape. However, the early Yiddish press essentially set the stage for what was to prove one of the greatest stories of all time-the near-biblical exodus of two million Jews from Eastern Europe who settled in and forever reshaped the United States.

J.K. Buchner, an idealistic young man who had been befriended by Horace Greeley, founded the Yiddishe tseitung as an ameliorative vehicle to help new immigrants find work and housing, and thus, keep them from undue exploitation. Modeled after Greeley's New York Herald, Buchner's journalistic venture aimed, as well, to educate its readers in "all aspects of politics, religion, history, science and art." While the Yiddish tesitung could never entirely make good on its promise, its heart was in the right place, and in the face of dire financial straits, continued to make a yeoman effort to get the news out until it folded in 1877.

Z.H. Bernstein, the uncle of Herman Bernstein, a New York Times correspondent who left the "Gray Lady" four decades later to become editor of der Tog, founded the Yiddishe post in 1870. He had the foresight to import Hebrew type and to hire Z. Gershuni, who knew how to set it. A year later, Bernstein widened his linguistic net and changed his newspaper's name to the Hebrew News and issued it in no less than four languages-Yiddish, Hebrew, German and English. Willing to try almost anything, Bernstein courted political patronage but when he bet on the wrong political horse-his candidate for NYC municipal supervisor went down in defeat-- the Hebrew News followed suit.

As soon as the flow of mass immigration from Eastern Europe begun pouring in 1881, America boasted its first Yiddish daily, the Tageblatt. The brainchild of Kasriel Sarasohn, a Russian-born printer by trade who would become the nation's first Yiddish newspaper magnate, it remained the only daily of its kind in the country for more than a decade. In fact, Sarasohn, no novice, had gotten a head start back in 1876 when he put out the Yidishe gazetn, a mixture of a reader's bulletin board and a writer's test lab. Within the first year of its publication it serially ran a long learned poem translated by Jacob Sobel from "the sacred tongue" into "Judeo-German", which in 1877 became the first Yiddish work to be published in book form in the United States.

Although, Sarasohn's Tageblatt had a religious bent and appealed to pious Jews, exhorting them to keep their traditions in the New World, it was not above the lure of yellow journalism, pioneered by Hearst and Pulitzer. Lifting domestic coverage from the German and English language press, it liberally spattered crime, sin and violence across its pages-giving venality and titillation a peculiarly Yiddish tam and committing more than few comical errors in the process.

Though Sarasohn's Tageblatt sometimes came close, it never erred as badly as a Philadelphia Yiddish weekly which ran the headline "The Empress of China Arrived Yesterday." The editor, Hayim Malitz, seeing a story on the shipping page of an American paper with the head "The Empress of China Arrived Yesterday on Her Maiden Voyage," took this to mean that China's virgin queen wanted a mate before allowing his imagination to fill in the details.

John Paley, the editor of the Tageblatt, much less pious in person than in print, was not averse to playing fast and loose with facts. During the Spanish American War he dug up incidents from the Spanish Inquisition and printed them as if they had occurred only yesterday. He manufactured copy with glee. One Chanukah day he was indulging in a portion of fried oysters in his office, when a Jewish peddler dropped in. Paley, a clever rogue, told his visitor he was eating latkes and soon the peddler had consumed a few himself. Paley then began shouting in mock horror that it was treyf. Frightened and nauseated, the poor man threw up and lay sick at home for several days. In the next day's Tageblatt Paley wickedly invented a story about a gang of anti-Semites who had caught a poor Jewish peddler on East Broadway and stuffed oysters down his throat until he died of suffocation. Paley's liberties with fact and incident helped bring the Tageblatt's circulation in 1900 to an enviable100,000 (or so it was said).

The Socialist Labor Party's Arbeiter tseitung, edited initially by Philip Krantz, a refined, sensitive intellectual, was Paley's chief ideological foe. Krantz was soon replaced by Abraham Cahan, who helped make it an effective propaganda tool by writing impassioned editorials urging unionization and printing such literary works as Peretz's famous story, "Bontsche Schweig." Cahan later moved to the Forverts, where he helped to break the Tageblatt's hold on the Yiddish public, transforming his new found medium into what would become a prosperous socialist newspaper of international renown.

The Yiddish dailies flirted with the literary, making a point of printing verse and fiction by noted writers. Shmuel Niger, dean of American Yiddish letters, spoke highly of the socialist press as a source of the "fructification of Yiddish culture." City College philosopher Morris Rapahel Cohen, teacher to a generation of bright children of immigrant Jews, maintained in his memoir, A Dreamer's Journey, that the Arbeiter tseitung, which allowed him to dip into Flaubert's Salambo in translation and which made the dismal science of economics intelligible, outranked the English newspapers of the time. No small praise for a press just emerging from its swaddling clothes!

Statesman without a state, wandering Jew, Mr. Reparations—myriad are the labels associated with Nahum Goldmann, one of the most prominent Jewish and Zionist leaders of the twentieth century, whose achievements are now on exhibit at the Center for Jewish History.

Today, alas, Nahum Goldmann's name is obscured by larger personalities like Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion, but even those who see him as lesser in stature, cannot deny his major role in the orchestration of Jewish politics of the twentieth century. The last in a long tradition of Court Jews of Klal Yisroel, Nahum Goldmann was the son of an ardent Zionist and the nephew of a Hebrew author and publisher. He was born on July 10, 1894, in Viznevo, a shtetl between Vilna and Minsk in the very heart of the Pale of Settlement.

At the age of six he was brought to Frankfurt and grew up in a home suffused with Jewish culture and politics, a gathering place for leading Zionists, journalists and intellectuals. Goldmann writes: "Although I spent no more than my first six years in Eastern Europe, I vividly remember those early experiences and have always been aware that the most important influences on the development of my mind and character came from Eastern European Judaism. I did not become a Zionist - I always was one."

Reared in Frankfurt, Goldmann lost little time in entering the political fray. While still in high school, he accompanied his father in 1911 to the Tenth Zionist Congress. Two years later, he traveled to Palestine and became enthralled by the magic of the country. He stayed on for five months and later wrote a travelogue based on his experiences; Reisebrief aus Palestina (Travel Letters from Palestine). Goldmann studied law at the University of Heidelberg and philosophy at the University of Marburg. He lectured widely on Jewish subjects and published articles in the monthly "Der Jude," edited by Martin Buber. In time, as he writes, "...it was a delight for me to assimilate German culture, which is still my basic culture to this day."

World War I marked a watershed in his life. A confirmed German patriot, Goldmann joined the Information Department of the German Foreign Ministry on the strength of a pro-Kaiser manifesto he authored, The Spirit of Militarism, a rare copy of which is housed in the collection of the Leo Baeck Institute. As a foreign officer, he possessed a unique vantage point from which to promote the pro-German orientation of the Zionist movement.

Nahum Goldmann's uncle, the publisher, A.L. Shalkovich (Ben-Avigdor), bandied about the idea of a Jewish encyclopedia in the early years of the twentieth century. After his sudden death in 1921, his nephew, together with a friend, Jacob Klatzkin, set up a publishing house, Eshkol, in order to pursue the project themselves. They managed to attract the leading Jewish scholars and intellects of the day, and between 1928 and 1934 succeeded in publishing ten volumes in German and two in Hebrew.

The rise of Nazism halted the completion of the encyclopedia and destroyed the hopes of German Jewry. In 1935, Goldmann's German citizenship was revoked. As conditions worsened for world Jewry, Goldmann, together with Rabbi Stephen Wise, established the World Jewish Congress, which in his words "had two simple functions: to symbolize and make a reality of the common resolution of the Jewish people to unite in defense of its rights; and to secure the cooperation of the various branches of this dispersed people in all matters of common interest." Under his able coordination, the constituent assembly of the World Jewish Congress met in Geneva in 1936 and despite its lack of power, acted as the Jewish people's representative during the darkest days of its history.

In 1940, Goldmann arrived in the U.S. and made the rounds between New York and Washington in a futile effort to help save the Jews of Europe. "In all my years in Jewish politics, I have never felt so impotent, so grimly bitter as I did over this. All of us who speak for the Jewish people in those days-- and I emphatically include myself --bear a share of the guilt." The State Department's deliberate foot-dragging and the American administration's indifference to the fate of European Jewry helped doom six million to their deaths. American Jewry, daunted and divided, failed to close ranks at a time when unity of intention and purpose was vital.

During World War II, Goldmann, intensifying his Zionist advocacy, helped organize the 1942 Biltmore Conference, which supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and played an active and at times decisive role in the diplomatic and public- relations struggle to create the Jewish state.

Perhaps his single greatest post-war achievement was his artful negotiation with the Federal Republic of Germany on reparation payments to Israel and the Jewish people for the crimes committed by the Nazis. The negotiations stirred much controversy, especially in Israel, where opposition leader Menachem Begin led angry, often violent protests against what he and his supporters deemed Israel's trafficking with German "blood money." Undaunted, Goldmann arranged for secret preliminary contact with Konrad Adenauer, the German Chancellor.

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims, the most comprehensive and representative world Jewish body on such matters, was established in October 1951 on Goldmann's initiative. His diplomatic skills and Adenauer's commitment to the idea and the ties of friendship and trust that bound the two men were major factors in the success of the negotiations which culminated in the signing of the reparations agreement in Luxembourg by the Federal Republic of West Germany, the State of Israel and the Claims Conference. To date the German government has paid out 100 billion DM to Holocaust survivors on five continents.

In later years, Goldmann proved to be a Zionist gadfly, fiercely criticizing the policy of Ben Gurion and the Israeli governments of the 1950s and 1960s, which, he argued, squandered any possibilities of dialogue with the Arabs and preferred to establish facts through military force. His efforts to meet with Nasser came to naught in part because of Israeli opposition to his self-appointed status as exilarch, leader of the Jewish world.

"Ben Gurion once reproached me with being a wandering Jew," Nahum Goldmann recalled in deep old age, "and I told (him) that he considered problems from the viewpoint of Sde Boker, his little kibbutz, whereas I saw them from a plane flying twelve thousand meters high." His stratospheric perch impressed some but irritated many, especially in Israel. The much traveled Nachum Goldmann, the proud possessor of eight passports, a connoisseur of culture, conceded that his apartment in Jerusalem was not his permanent home. He preferred the cosmopolitanism of Paris and Geneva to the parochialism of the Holy City. But when Nahum Goldmann died on August 29, 1982, the wheel came full circle: he was laid to rest in Jerusalem's Har Herzl National Cemetery, in the plot of presidents of the World Zionist Organization.

Richard Wagner, one of the nineteenth century's most influential anti-Semites, made Jew hatred culturally respectable. Judaism, he argued, was inherently alien and inferior, an insinuating, degenerative force that could not but corrupt Europe. In "Das Judentum in der Musik" (1850), an article he published anonymously (under the pen name "Freigedank") in Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, part of the extensive archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, he identifies the "spirit of Judaism" with decadent modernity and artistic decline.

Joseph Reich, trustee of the Center for Jewish History, discovered that Wagner's screed against the Jews was a contributing factor in the immigration to the United States from the Pfalz (Palatinate) region of Germany of his ancestor, Marx Klein, a Civil War veteran who fought with General George Custer.

As a young man, Wagner had benefited from the help of Jewish artists and musicians but then turned viciously against them. In 1839 Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Berlin-born composer of spectacular operas and the son of Jacob Herz Beer, a prominent banker, made the acquaintance of Wagner and assisted him in his attempts to have his operas produced in Paris. He warmly recommended Wagner's opera "Rienzi" for production in Dresden and during his period as royal director of opera in Berlin (1842-47), introduced "The Flying Dutchman" into the repertoire. Heinrich Heine, the German poet, also provided essential assistance in the early years of Wagner's budding career.

In "Das Judentum in der Musik", Wagner, denied in principle Jewish cultural creativity-- musical originality remaining totally inaccessible to the Jew. The composers Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn were incapable of profundity, but only of sweet and tinkling melodies, piquant diversions, a charge Wagner repeated in 1862 in "Oper und Drama." While Felix Mendelssohn, whom he once revered, may at times have seduced the German whimsical imagination, he could never sound "the deep and genuine feelings of the human heart."

Wagner's aversion to Jews went deeper than that of most of his contemporaries. He pronounced Jewry's entry into modern society as the very undoing of German and European culture. Yiddish, "a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle," provoked his ire and the Volk's "instinctive antipathy," representing the quintessential corruption of German language and culture. However, Wagner gives no quarter to the modern assimilated Jew either, who remains "the most heartless of all human beings," alien and pathetic in the midst of a society he cannot understand, whose history and evolution are foreign to him. The Jew, he continues, is wholly divorced from the Volksgeist, lacks passion, soul, any "inner capacity for life." True music is beyond the likes of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, the former dismissed out of hand and the latter taken severely to task for his limitations, his inability to go beyond Beethoven. Everything Mendelssohn, who presumably lacked the Teutonic folk soul, wrote must, by necessity, lack passion, warmth and ethical depth arising from good German stock.

Wagner similarly dismissed the literature of Jewish born Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Borne as wan, bloodless, sarcastic and self-negating. Although Wagner was one of the first to set Heine's "Two Grendadiers" to music, he later wrote of the German Jewish poet as consumed by a "remorseless demon of denial" that duped him into thinking he was a poet.

Europe's redemption from this curse of sterility lies, in Wagner's estimation, in the Untergang of Jewry, its complete disappearance, which cannot but serve Europe as well as its Jews, as a colossal benefit. In this respect, Wagner shares Karl Marx's view that Jews incarnated the evil of commercialism and turned art into a commodity. For Marx in "The Jewish Question", "the social emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of society from Judaism." Comparably, for Wagner, "To become a human being together with us means for the Jew…first of all ceasing to be a Jew."

Under his own name, Wagner republished his notoriously venomous article as a separate pamphlet entitled "Enlightenment on Jewry in Music" in 1869, blaming his current problems on alleged Jewish control of the press, theater and cultural life. Identifying modern materialism with Jewish influence, he envisaged its forced removal from cultural life. Two years earlier in 1867, in a series of articles entitled "German Art and Politics" in the semi-official Bavarian Suddeutsche Presse, Wagner expounded his ideas of the pure-blooded German mission opposed to "alien" French and Jewish materialism.

Wagner offered German anti-Semitism a faux aesthetic rationale and a pseudo-metaphysics. The later Wagner, influenced by the racist philosophy of the French diplomat and historian Comte de Gobineau, whom he personally befriended, is already a theorist of blood purity, insisting on the need to cleanse European civilization from the spiritual and physical pollution of the Jews. De Gobineau's work was not well received at first in France, where the values of the Revolution, such as human equality, were still influential, but in Germany it became all the rage.

By 1881, Wagner's racist strain had intensified to the point that he could write to Ludwig II of Bavaria, in a further and more pernicious echoing of his opinions of 1850: "I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it. It is certain that it is running us Germans to the ground, and I am perhaps the last German who knows how to hold himself upright in the face of Judaism, which already rules everything."

Thus, Wagner offered no hope for a viable Jewish life in Germany ever, but only the prospect of its eventual elimination. A Jew could drop his mannerisms, change his dress and bearing, engage in the most accepted of professions, be baptized and adopt Christianity with the fervor of the most devout, but to Wagner he would still be a Jew. So would his children and grandchildren, whatever their religious practice. The Jew must like Alberich in the Ring cycle be inherently alien and inferior, an insinuating, degenerative force intent on corrupting the world.

Small wonder that Joseph Reich's forbear, Marx Klein, and thousands upon thousands of other German Jews left for America in the nineteenth century. Would that more, many more, had followed in his footsteps and avoided the dire consequences of Wagner's ingratitude and malediction!

The South is perhaps the most historically haunted region of the nation, its past more fraught with racial problems than elsewhere. Myths, conceits and stereotypes cling tenaciously to this part of the country. Popular notions of bubbas, black Baptists and languishing belles notwithstanding, the South has been and remains a dynamic engine of cultural and ethnic diversity.

For more than three centuries, Jews have been integral participants in the drama that is Southern life. The recent Yeshiva University Museum exhibition, "A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life," underscores the vigor and vitality of the South's immigrant and post-immigrant life. Organized by the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, and artfully curated by transplanted New York native Dale Rosengarten, the extensive exhibit and catalogue highlighting historic paintings, precious family heirlooms and an array of contemporary photographs provide a fascinating examination of the richly textured life and culture of Southern Jewry.

The first known Jew to set foot on Southern soil, Joachim Gans, was a metallurgist from Prague who accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on his 1585 voyage to the New World and established the first smelting furnace in North America in what is now North Carolina. Later Jewish arrivals brought the cotton gin to Alabama, the peach to Georgia and the "traveling dry goods store" to rural households.

With the arrival from London of 42 Jewish colonists in 1733, many of them descendants of Sephardim exiled from Spain, the first Jewish community in the South was established in James Oglethorpe's Georgia. Seventy years later, Charleston, South Carolina, a center of tolerance for both Jews and Christian dissenters, had grown sufficiently to become home to the largest and wealthiest Jewish community in North America, outranking those of New York and Philadelphia. Indeed, until 1830 Charleston was the capital of American Jewry, trailblazing the arrival of Reform Judaism in America, electing the first professing Jew to office and sending its sons off to war.

In 1816, Isaac Harby, the Charleston Jewish intellectual born the year after the passage of the federal Constitution, reflected his generation's newborn confidence in his letter to Secretary of State James Monroe, "Jews are by no means to be considered as a Religious sect, tolerated by the government. They constitute a portion of the People…Quakers and Catholics, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, Baptists and Jews -- all constitute one great political family."

For many Jews, South Carolina fulfilled a long-held fantasy, the biblical promise of a "land of milk and honey." Indeed, the Rev. Gustavus Poznanski, an observant Polish Jewish immigrant educated in Germany and a former practicing shochet (ritual slaughterer) in New York, pronounced in his 1841 rededication speech honoring Charleston's new temple Beth Elohim, "This synagogue is our temple, this city is our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine."

Eli Evans writes aptly in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue: "The new colony and the struggling seaport of Charleston needed people with trading skills and imagination, contacts and credibility, and a world view that looked outward to the sea and westward to a vast continent. Jews brought all this and more. They were active players in the colonial enterprise, eager for success and wanting to be judged only by their qualification. In more ways than one, it was a marriage made in heaven. Jews were free to worship as they saw fit, to move about the country, and to practice their professions of their choice." But it was a two-way street: "If Carolina was good for the Jews, the Jews were also good for Carolina."

Jewish Charleston embodied principles of duty and patriotism that still stir the imagination more than two centuries later. Francis Salvador, a newly arrived immigrant, became the first professing Jew in America to serve in a legislative assembly. In 1774, he was elected to the First Provincial Congress in Charleston. When a South Carolina republic was set up the next year, Salvador signed and stamped the new currency.

Salvador's record of achievement does not stop with civilian life. He was also the first Jew to die for his country in the summer of 1776 at the hands of a band of Cherokee loyalists. Salvador's commander told John Rutledge, President of South Carolina, "I found him with a savage wound to the head. He asked whether I had beaten the enemy. I told him ‘Yes'. He said he was glad of it, shook me by the hand and bade me farewell." Indeed, so many Jews in the South rallied to the Revolutionary cause that a Charleston company formed by Captain Richard Lushington was called "the Jews' Company."

South Carolina Jewry, highly status conscious, displayed a proclivity for the Southern-bred gentility, living in fine houses and traveling abroad. Ashkenazim, who by the time of the American Revolution outnumbered Sephardim, adopted traditional Sephardic practices, called themselves Sephardi and assumed an aristocratic view of themselves as "earliest-to-arrive."

In the decades before the Civil War, hundreds of Jewish immigrants from the German states, Prussia and Poland came to South Carolina, attracted by Charleston's established Jewish community and busy port and its hinterlands. Isaiah Moses (1772-1857), the son of a butcher from Bederkesa, a village near Bremerhaven, was typical. With no future in the Old World, he arrived in the South, started out in dry goods, and in time married Rebecca Phillips, the daughter of a Jewish Revolutionary war veteran with roots in colonial Newport. Business was so good that by 1813 he owned the Oaks, a 794-acre plantation built by the aristocratic Middletons of South Carolina.

German-born Jews fanned out across the South Carolina until almost every market town was served by at least one-Jewish-owned shop. Their children and grandchildren became lawyers, doctors, journalists and soldiers, and soon a steady assimilating stream of native-born Jewish Carolinians pushed north to Baltimore and west to Mississippi in search of new frontiers. Isaiah Moses' grandsons, Alfred and Mordecai Moses, moved to Alabama where Alfred founded the town of Sheffield and built the tallest building in Alabama, the Moses Building of Montgomery, all of seven stories high, while Mordecai served with distinction as mayor of Montgomery from 1877 to 1881. Alfred's grandson is Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., a longtime supporter of the American Jewish Historical Society.

While South Carolina may have been "our Palestine" for the Jews, it was far less so for blacks. By 1830 some 83 percent of Charleston's Jews owned slaves, just shy of the 87 percent of all whites who were slave owners. Jews had become so well assimilated into the life of the Carolinas, that their participation in the ignominy of the south's racial economy, buying and selling chattel slaves, scarcely raised a dissenting word.

As in the Revolutionary War, a patriotic South Carolina Jewry rallied around the Confederacy. Charleston's own Judah Benjamin delivered Louisiana's speech of secession from the floor of the U. S. Senate. Later Benjamin served as attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state of the Confederacy. So strongly was he identified with the cause of the South that his likeness was reproduced on the Confederate two-dollar bill.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the face of South Carolina as well as that of Southern Jewry had changed: the eastern European migration swamped everything before it. In time, they too – Yiddish-speaking Jews and their descendents -- became a portion of the people, although less taken with genteel codes of yore. Within decades their children went on to serve in two world wars and became pillars of the Jewish community. Theirs is a story of pluck, patience and perseverance, part of the gleaming mosaic of over three centuries of Jewish life in the South.

Perhaps no weapon in America's media arsenal has proven as lasting as the Hollywood movie. What began as a low-grade form of entertainment, a somewhat disreputable venture at the turn of the nineteenth century became the most powerful international tool of American cultural power. Will Hays, the president of the original Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, called the film industry "the quintessence of what we mean by ‘America'."

The founders and inventors of this "quintessential America" were almost without exception, immigrant and first-generation Jews. Within a few years of each other, Carl Laemmele built Universal; Adolf Zukor and Jesse Lasky, Paramount; Louis B. Mayer and the Schenks, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; and Harry Cohn, Columbia. Together with the Warner Brothers, William Fox, and Samuel Goldwyn, these Moguls, whose lives and times are richly documented in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society, created a constellation as brilliant as any the firmament could offer.

Who were they? A remarkably similar group --Yiddish-speaking immigrants or their sons, born in grinding poverty in shtetlekh or ghettoes, to pedigree-poor families, headed more often than not by ne'er do-well fathers. The Moguls, the men who invented the majesty and mystery of Hollywood, were a rough-hewn bunch of ambitious men determined to thrust themselves into the epicenter of American life.

Like Sam Goldwyn, famous for his malapropisms, many were semi-literate in English and made vulgarity and crudeness their stock in trade. At a dinner he gave to honor Madame Chiang Kai Shek, the flippant, fast-talking Jack Warner, a frustrated stand-up comedian, turned to the evening's guest of honor and exclaimed, "Holy cow, I forgot to pick up my laundry." When Albert Einstein visited his studio, Warner later boasted of telling the greatest scientist since Newton, "You know, I have a theory about relatives, too—don't hire them." And the acerbic, oftentimes slashing Harry Cohn once said, "To hell with the critics. They are like eunuchs. They can tell you how to do it but they can't do it themselves."

They began arriving in America during the 1880s, penniless boys drifting restlessly from job to job. Cutting their teeth on the ragged, half-world of fashion and retail, they became masters in gauging market swings, acquiring a special feel for detecting public taste. They finally struck it rich with the Nickelodeon, among the first to realize that people who were willing to stand in an arcade for a penny to see a movie, would pay a nickel to sit, as opposed to a quarter for live entertainment. 1903 was the turning point, the year that Carl Laemmle, Adolf Zukor, William Fox, and the Warner brothers came upon this paying invention. Within the next two decades they transformed a practically non-existent industry into one of the largest in America.

As immigrants themselves, the moguls in the making picked up on the dreams and aspirations of other immigrants and the working class, two largely overlapping groups, who would comprise a large portion of the early movie-going audience. By 1910, most of the future moguls were owners of small chains of moving-picture parlors that boasted whitewashed exteriors, uniformed ushers and male vocalists. Clever tacticians with a nose for making money, they understood that real profit lay in the distribution and eventually in production of movies.

Carl Laemmle, who blithely appropriated the name Universal in 1915 from a passing truck advertising a firm called "Universal Pipe Fittings," was among the first Jewish producers to move to Hollywood. Three years earlier Sam Goldwyn and his brother-in-law Jesse Lasky, founders in Hollywood of the Lasky Feature Picture Company, produced Cecil B. DeMille's "The Squaw Man," giving birth to the celluloid Wild West.

These dream peddlers were particularly adept at turning a spark of talent into a blazing star. William Fox took credit for "discovering" Tom Mix and Theda Bara, a Jewish tailor's daughter from Cincinnati born Theodosia Goodman. Carl Laemmle did the same for Mary Pickford. Harry Cohn's credits included Ronald Coleman, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant. Louis B. Mayer, a super-patriot who appropriated the Fourth of July for his birthday, created stars as diverse as Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. Sam Goldwyn (nee Gelbfisz) exploited the movie potential of Eddie Cantor, Danny Kaye, Gary Cooper and Joel McCrea, while Jack Warner turned such names as Robinson, Bogart, Raft, Garfield, Flynn, Muni and Davis into box-office gold.

The Moguls were uncomfortable with their Jewishness. When they finally gave to Jewish causes, they gave, according to Ben Hecht, as a way of doing penance for not being good Jews. And when they didn't give, they were often nasty about it. Asked to support the cause of Jewish relief, Harry Cohn, the only mogul to be both bar-mitzvahed and posthumously baptized, said, "Relief for the Jews? How about relief from the Jews." His other abrasions included defiantly keeping Columbia Pictures open on Yom Kippur.

The Moguls wanted desperately to be regarded as Americans and not as Jews. In a slew of anti-Nazi films Hollywood produced in the thirties and forties, nary a word is mentioned of anti-Semitism abroad. As for anti-Semitism at home, barely a frame was devoted to the subject until the making of "Gentlemen's Agreement," produced by one of the few gentile producers in the industry, Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox. The birth pangs of Israel elicited little interest, and "Exodus" made its way to the silver screen only when the Jewish state was a foregone conclusion, a fixed reality in the minds of the movie-going public.

Neither scholars nor gentlemen nor very good Jews, the Hollywood Moguls, nevertheless, sounded a fundamental chord of American life. They had their finger on the pulse of Main Street as well as the main chance. Connoisseurs of mass entertainment, they reinvented a nation in the image of their dreams and gave it its most enduring cultural legacy.

In no other country in recorded history have Jews thrived with quite the vigor and vitality as in America. Here the ark of liberty found early harbor, inaugurating a new and larger sense of freedom.

One of the earliest milestones in the struggle for Jewish liberty in the New World must surely be the 1705 "Letter of Denization" England's Queen Anne conferred on Louis Gomez, a prominent New York Jew and later president of Shearith Israel, the oldest congregation on American soil. This parchment document, housed at Gomez Mill House, set the mold for the future expansion of a people's freedom. Queen Anne granted the Gomezes three fundamental rights: the merchant's right to travel and trade freely; the landowner's right to own property with unrestricted disposition; and the citizen's right to hold offices, both civil and military, equal to the most favorite subject.

The denizen papers, written nearly three centuries ago, proved a quantum jump in Jewish civic and economic freedom in America; in effect, serving as a kind of a preview of the Bill of Rights, providing not only refuge but an expanding realm of equality in the Diaspora. As a denizen, Louis Gomez, the son of a converso or convert to Christianity whose family fled the Spanish Inquisition in the nick of time, acquired under rights of patent several thousand acres of land in Orange and Ulster County on which he and his sons established in 1714 an Indian trading post six miles from Newburgh, itself just settled a few years earlier. Gomez and his sons were soon deep into bargaining with a bevy of Indians over how much whisky or how many tomahawks or trinkets constituted a fair price for a beaver, a mink, a muskrat or a sable. In time, their involvement in the fur trade gave them the financial clout to expand their land holdings and construct what is today the oldest Jewish house in America.

Built of stone with heavy shutters and doors, Gomez Mill House (www.gomez.org -- tel: 845-236-3126), situated strategically on nearly the furthest reaches of the frontier, stands today as a proud and enduring monument to enterprise and fortitude.

The Gomezes were by no means the first Jewish Indian traders in America. Since the days of Peter Stuyvesant, Jewish peddlers had traveled up and down the Hudson and Delaware rivers bartering dry goods, hardware and liquor for pelts and hides. The Gomezes differed in settling down as a family and operating within the world of La Nacion, an international community of Sephardic Jews on both sides of the Atlantic, as merchant-shippers of fur, wheat and flour, the principal exports of the day. They prospered by sending ships loaded with goods to London, Amsterdam or Hamburg, whereupon the vessels were reloaded with wine, pewter, looking glasses and earthenware, which made their way across the ocean to America via Curacao, Barbados or Jamaica.

The Gomez Caribbean connection was pivotal to the family's economic success story. Its ledger books contain frequent references to Caribbean correspondents—Isaac Abenater of Curacao, Isaac de Silva and Jacob Rodriges of Jamaica to name but a few. Moreover, such business contacts paved the way for Gomez's sons to find Jewish brides and bring them back to New York.

Indeed the Caribbean Sea initially proved a sea bridge between Europe and the American continent for fleeing Jews. After Isaac Gomez, Louis' father, escaped Spain and the Inquisition for refuge in France, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had hitherto protected non-Catholics in France, forced him to leave yet again for more tolerant lands. Louis XIV's punitive decree precipitated a major migration of Jews and French Huguenots to the Protestant world of Holland, England and their Caribbean colonies and finally to the American mainland, a trajectory the Gomezes faithfully followed.

The Gomezes, one of the first Jewish families to settle in New York, the largest commercial port in North America, prospered to such a notable degree that by 1711, they were one of the six Jewish merchant families to contribute to the building of Trinity Church's steeple at Broadway and Wall Street—one of the tallest man-made structures then standing in North America. By 1720 the Gomez home in the East Ward of Manhattan had a higher assessment than any other Jewish residence.

New York's religious and ethnic diversity proved advantageous for the Gomezes. The original Dutch settlement at New Amsterdam, which soon became the most culturally diverse European colony in North America, included, besides the Dutch themselves, Huguenots, Englishmen, Germans, Jews and African slaves. More than eighteen languages were heard in lower Manhattan, and by the time Louis Moses Gomez arrived, he represented one of a score of religions and ethnicities that formed the mosaic we call New York, a city that then boasted the only Jewish community worthy of the name in North America.

And yet for many years the Gomez family constituted a Jewish community unto itself, with one son, David, serving as family shochet (ritual slaughterer), and another, Benjamin, officiating as mohel (circumciser). In the late 1720s, as head of a rapidly growing clan, Gomez solicited support from Sephardi communities in the Caribbean for the establishment in 1730 by Congregation Shearith Israel on Mill St of the first building in New York constructed as a synagogue. Indeed, during most of the eighteenth century, the Gomez family effectively controlled Shearith Israel, with Louis and his sons serving repeatedly as parnassim (presidents).

But for all their welcome and success, the Gomezes were confronted with local anti-Semitism. In 1737, during an argument that arose over the outcome of a New York Assembly election in which members of the Gomez family and other Jews held the swing vote, William Smith, the future Chief Justice of New York, declared in an impassioned speech that an apparent majority gained through Jewish votes was by necessity illegal as Jews were responsible for the death of Christ and thus should not have been allowed to vote in the first place. Without further ado, the Assembly passed a resolution that Jews "ought not to be admitted to vote for representatives in the colony." For decades this resolution cast a pall over New York Jewry.

Although conditions in colonial New York left much to be desired, Louis Moses Gomez, a modern Hebrew patriarch and true American pioneer, succeeded in strengthening a stalwart Jewish identity while trailblazing a new life of economic success and social distinction.

For over two thousands years, Greek Jewry, heir to the great civilizations of the Mediterranean, lived at the crossroads of history. Salonika, known as "La Madre d'Israel (Mother of Israel)," and Rhodes, famed as "La Piccola Gerusalemi (Small Jerusalem)," were the civic pride of Jewry--their customs and folkways, developed over two millennia, products of an especially rich cultural weave.

In modern as in ancient times, Greek Jews were subject to the competing currents of tradition and assimilation. The current exhibit, "Integrated and Distinct: Images of the Jews from Greece 1880-1930," organized by the American Sephardi Federation/Sephardic House at the Center for Jewish History, underscores the rival influences of a community on the cusp of modernity and interprets this brilliant social and economic dynamic via such traditional life cycle events as birth, marriage, death, and holidays, as well as emigration to the New World.

Historically, Greek Jewry has been made up of largely two groups: Romaniotes, indigenous, Greek-speaking Hellenized Jews who date their ancestry back to the Roman Empire and who became Greek in everything but religion; and Sephardim who arrived in Greece, then part of the Ottoman Empire, at the end of the fifteenth century, after their brutal expulsion from Catholic Spain. Indeed, Sultan Bayezid II's famous invitation to the Spanish Jews welcomed throngs of refugees from Spain to Macedonia, Thrace, and Salonika, as well as to Volos and Larissa in Thessaly.

The Sephardim in time absorbed most of the Romaniotes into their rich network of religious culture developed over hundreds of years on the Iberian peninsula. Today, the only Romaniote synagogues are those in Ioannina and Chalkis in Greece, the Zakynthos Synagogue in Tel Aviv and the Kehila Kedosha Janina on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere.

For hundreds of years, Romaniote and Sephardic Jews lived under the relatively tolerant rule of the Caliphate in Constantinople. Between 1880 and 1930, many Jews found themselves catapulted from Ottoman Moslem rule into Greek nationalism. There is a saying among them that they "went to sleep as Turks and woke up as Greeks." And what they woke up to was a rising tide of Orthodox Christian and nationalist-inspired anti-Semitism. For the first time in centuries, Greek Jews were exposed to outbreaks of mob violence and massacres. Canards and suspicions multiplied even though at the end of the Turkish Greek war of 1877, 10,000 Jews had fought valiantly on the side of Athens.

A new Greek nationality often brought in its wake uncomfortable compromises: Saturday, traditionally the rest day in Jewish Salonika, became a market day while Sunday was deliberately and inconveniently transformed into the officially sanctioned day of rest, a definite blow to observant Jews. The battle for the Jewish Sabbath began in 1917 and concluded with a Greek victory in 1922. Rabbi Joshua Plaut, a leading scholar of Greek Jewry and executive director of the Center for Jewish History, writes in his book, "Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913-1983": "More than any other single law or policy, the enforcement of Sunday as the mandatory commercial rest day for Greeks of all cultural and religious persuasions signified to the Jews that overt measures were being taken to completely hellenize Greek society."

Hellenization drove Jewish youth into Greek schools and to mastery of the Greek language, causing the older generation, especially among the Spanish-speaking Sephardim, to fear the loss of their linguistic tradition. Between 1930 and 1935 Greek policy forced the closing of the branch schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the first international Jewish organization in the modern era founded for the express purpose of defending and perpetuating Jewish culture in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, setting the stage for still further harsh decrees.

While Jews obtained the rights of citizenship, the disdain and reproach implied beneath official Greek conduct during the interwar years was inescapable, perhaps reminding these Jews of Sephardic descent yet again of the discerning lines of Judah Halevi, the medieval Spanish-Jewish poet and their most famous bard: "Let not the wisdom/of the Greeks beguile thee,/Which hath no fruit but only flowers."

In 1916, the super-patriotic Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos continued to up the nationalist ante, finally succeeding in breaking the centuries-long Jewish hold on Salonika after the 1917 great fire burned down the sprawling Jewish section, destroying 32 synagogues and 50 religious schools and leaving 50,000 homeless. Although Venizelos issued a decree compensating the Jews for houses destroyed, he shrewdly prohibited both the reconstruction of the ruins and the resettlement of the Jews in certain sections of the city.

"In retrospect," Rabbi Plaut observes, "the Salonika fire destroyed more than Jewish homes and businesses. It left scars on the whole body of Greek Jewry. The fire was a turning point-it became the first of many events which marked the diminishing strength of the Greek Jewish communities. It foreshadowed the more deadly Nazi oppression which swept across Europe like a crackling brushfire, killing millions of Jews before it was finally extinguished."

With the outbreak of World War II a dire situation turned desperate. On April 6, 1941, the Nazi army invaded Greece. By the end of 1942 the well-known cemetery in Salonika was destroyed. The first transport of Jewish deportees left Salonika on March 1943 for the gas chambers of Auschwitz, followed by further transports at quick intervals from the port city as well from Didimoticho, Nea Orestias, Naussa and Katerini. At the end of World War II, nearly 90 percent of Greek Jewry had been murdered.

The Jews, who had once lived and thrived on the rim of the Balkan peninsula stretching from the Ionian to the Aegean seas, were largely no more. In 1945 not a single Jew remained in Chios, Crete, Naussa, Katerini and Soufli. When the survivors returned from the concentration camps or from their mountain redoubts, they faced a very altered world: their homes were occupied by neighbors, their businesses taken over by strangers. Twenty years after the Holocaust, such former centers of Jewish life as Ioannina numbered fewer than 90 Jews and Rhodes fewer than 40. Yet, despite such savagely diminished figures, Greek Jewry in the post war era sought to suture the terrible wound of genocide. Here, then, is a story of both triumph and tragedy, a powerful lesson of a people's loss and resilience in the face of history's greatest trials.

2004 marked a significant landmark in American Jewish history: the 350th anniversary of the arrival of 23 Sephardic Jews from Recife, Brazil to what was still New Amsterdam. These refugees wrote the first page of a new chapter in the annals of Jewish history.

It all began with the wresting by the Dutch of a large chunk of the Portuguese colony of Brazil in the 1620s. Jews had been allowed to settle in the Protestant Netherlands since it had freed itself from Catholic Spain in the late 16th century. In order to strengthen their foothold in Brazil, the Dutch encouraged Jews (with whom they shared a common enemy in Catholic Spain and Portugal) to settle in the harbor city of Recife in the northeastern province of Pernambuco.

A vigorous Jewish community, the first in the New World, numbering over a thousand inhabitants, soon came into being complete with a synagogue, Tsur Yisroal; a rabbi, Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, who subsequently returned to Amsterdam to issue a herem (an edict of excommunication) against Baruch Spinoza for secularizing Judaism; doctors, lawyers, peddlers, merchants -- even a street called the Rua dos Judeos (Street of the Jews). Many Jews prospered in the tobacco, precious gems, wood and sugar trades.

Everything changed in 1654 when Portugal reconquered Brazil. Fearing the reenactment of the Inquisition, the Jews of Recife either returned to Holland or fled to Dutch, French, or English colonies in the Caribbean. Jews mainly of Sephardic descent (collectively known as "La Nacion") had recently established small but flourishing economic enclaves in Parimaribo, Barbados, Curacao, Jamaica, Hispanola and Cayenne.

A total of sixteen ships transported both Jewish and Dutch colonists from Recife. Fifteen arrived safely; however, the sixteenth was captured by Spanish pirates only to be overtaken by the St. Charles, a French privateer. After much negotiating, the master of the St. Charles agreed to bring a group of twenty-three Jewish men, women and children from the captured ship to New Amsterdam for 900 guilders in advance and 1,600 on arrival.

As New Amsterdam came into view with its gallows and weather beaten wooden houses dominating a raw, windswept landscape, feelings of foreboding swept over the tiny group, separated as they were by more than a thousand miles from the nearest Jewish settlement. New Amsterdam in 1654 was a frontier outpost filled with brawling sailors and rough-looking fur traders. Over fifty grog houses catered to a never-ending stream of bleary-eyed bruisers dropping in for a little fun on their way to or from Massachusetts or Virginia. Living on the very edge of what was then the known Western world posed a serious threat for these Jews.

Yet, unlike much of Europe at the time, New Amsterdam's cultural and religious mix made it easier for Jews to blend in among Dutch, English, Scotch-Irish, German, Portuguese, and Swedish settlers who, along the religious spectrum, included Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Quaker, Baptist, Anabaptist, Catholic, Congregationalist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian believers in a population of barely fifteen hundred.

Soon after the arrival of the twenty-three, suit was brought against them by the master of the St. Charles for payment of the balance owed him and his crew. Lacking ready cash, the newcomers had to put up their goods for auction. Simultaneously, Governor Peter Stuyvesant started a campaign to drive them from the colony. Governor also of Curacao, Stuyvesant had recently heard rumors of a boatload of Jews sent to Curacao ostensibly to oversee the cultivation of tobacco, indigo, and other crops, but who instead were selling goods at exorbitant prices. His resolve thus strengthened, Stuyvesant addressed the following remarks to the directors in Amsterdam of the Dutch West India Company, whose shareholders owned the colony:

"The Jews ... have arrived ... with their customary usury and deceitful trading. Owing to their present indigence, they might become a charge in the coming winter. We have, for the benefit of this weak and newly developing land, deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart. ... Praying that the deceitful race - such hateful blasphemers of the name of Christ - be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony, to the detraction of your worships and the dissatisfaction of your worships' most affectionate subjects."

Shortly thereafter the newcomers addressed the following remarks to the leaders of Amsterdam's Jewish community:

"Your Honors should consider that the Honorable Lords, the Burgomasters of the City, and the Honorable High Illustrious Mighty Lords, the States-General, have in political matters always protected and considered the Jewish nation as upon the same footing as all the inhabitants and burghers ...Your Honors should also please consider that many of the Jewish nation are principal shareholders in the Company."

Stuyvesant did not have to wait long for an answer: "We would have liked to fulfill your wishes ... but ... this would be somewhat unreasonable and unfair, especially because of the considerable loss sustained by this nation, with others, in the taking of Brazil, as also because of the large amount of capital which they still have invested in the shares of the Company. Therefore, we have decided these people may travel and trade to and in New Netherland and live and remain there." With these words Jews won the right to settle in what would become a haven for the Jewish people for three and a half centuries and more.

The passage of a half-century since the execution in Sing Sing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the first U.S. civilians to suffer the death penalty in an espionage trial, has not dimmed Jewish America's collective memory of this tragic event. Rarely if ever had Jewish communal division run so deep and political fallout spread so widely. Never had American Jewry's self-identity, its sense of loyalty and patriotism, its very innocence, been as severely tested as during the Rosenberg trial. For virtually the first time in the American Jewish experience, a front-page spy case hit uncomfortably close to home. In fact, all the principals in this at times histrionic drama - defendants, co-defendants, defense lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses, the trial judge, even a U.S. Supreme Court justice – were Jews. Both The "FORWARD" files at YIVO and the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) have useful materials on this still controversial subject.

In 1950, the FBI arrested Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer who had worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and his wife Ethel on charges of conspiracy to transmit classified military information to Russia. In the trial that followed in March 1951, the government charged that in 1944 and 1945, the Rosenbergs had persuaded Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, an employee at the Los Alamos atomic bomb project, to hand over top-secret a-bomb data which was then passed on to the Soviet Union. Urged on by assistant prosecutor Roy Cohn, David Greenglass lied about his sister copying and editing his Los Alamos espionage notes on her high school portable Remington typewriter. Though implicated by her own admission, David's wife Ruth was not prosecuted while David's sentence was cut in half. By having Ethel convicted and sentenced to death, the prosecution hoped to get Julius to confess, naming names, in exchange for their lives. Instead, they went to their deaths naming no names.

The Rosenberg and Greenglass families were part of the great migration of Jews from Russia to America at the turn of the century. Reading like a cast of characters in a Clifford Odets play, their story begins with Ethel and David growing up in a cold-water flat at 64 Sheriff Street in the heart of the Lower East Side with a toilet in the hall and a Yiddish-speaking mother pitching in as super to make ends meet. The children were a part of a big family living under one roof. In addition to another brother Bernie, who became a World War II hero, and a half-brother Sam from a previous wife, there were their parents, Tessie and Barney, Tessie's parents, Hersh and Ethel Feit, and Tessie's brothers Abe and Sam and their families. The lives they lived of necessity were thoroughly Jewish.

Described as a "moonfaced, happy little guy with no intellectual depth whatsoever," David was no match for his older sister. While David barely got through vocational high school, Ethel's star sparkled at Seward Park. Though Zero Mostel was her classmate, it was Ethel, with her passion for Italian arias and Russian peasants, who was singled out in her 1931 yearbook as someone who by 1950 would be America's leading actress. Ethel wanted to go to college but ended up working in a paper-box factory on Bleecker Street.

Julius, born in 1918, three years after Ethel, also grew up poor. When his father's dry-cleaning store failed, the Rosenbergs moved from East Harlem to the Lower East Side where Julius as a City College undergraduate first noticed Ethel in 1936 at a Seamen's Union benefit singing "Ciribiribin." By now Ethel, along with Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, Zero Mostel and many other poor New York Jews, was a true believer in the power of Communist Russia to rid the world of poverty, misery, and insecurity, all of which Ethel knew of first hand. Julius, replacing David as her star pupil, soon fell into step. This, according to Rebecca West, was the defining moment in "the involvement of brother and sister in an unnatural relationship, which is the hostile twin of incest."

In 1939, the same year he graduated from City College (79th out of 85 with a degree in electrical engineering), Julius joined the Communist Party. In June of that year Julius and Ethel settled down to married life in Ethel's bedroom at 64 Sheriff Street. For years the only glamour in their lives was Julius's connection to Alexander Feklisov, an NKVD operative. "Julius loved intelligence work," Feklisov recalled, "with its romantic aura elevating him above the monotony of every day life."

Blessed with friends who shared his views, Julius developed an idea, according to Feklisov, "that all of his friends were our potential recruits." By the time his-brother-in-law David in 1944 was assigned as an army machinist to America's most secret military installation at Los Alamos, the idea was fixed, the dye was cast. Though the NKVD already had two sources at Los Alamos -- Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall -- Feklisov gave Julius the green light to recruit David which he did with the cooperation of David's wife Ruth, a childhood sweetheart whose father earned $25 a week as a butcher. For handing over secrets the Greenglasses were paid $500, which would have taken Ruth's father almost a half-year to make.

The NKVD used Harry Gold as a contact for both David Greenglass and Klaus Fuchs. Thus, when Fuchs was caught five years later, the trail led inevitably to the Rosenbergs and the Greenglasses who told all and then some. As for the punishment fitting the crime: "Whatever else Julius Rosenberg delivered to the Russians," wrote Sam Roberts in The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case (2001), "they would have built the atomic bomb without him." At the height of anti-Communist hysteria fifty years ago, people didn't want to know that. And even if they did, it might not have changed their minds. Was Benedict Arnold any less culpable, for example, because the British lost the war?

Everything possible and impossible was done to save them. Their case was carried to the Supreme Court where Justice Felix Frankfurter protested the unseemly lack of full judicial review of governmental decision-making. Even the pope appealed for clemency. Yet only the most severe punishment seemed able to erase the "shande" of national betrayal. That the Rosenbergs turned out to be a handy "kapporah" (a rooster waved over one's head as a means of passing on one's sins to the scapegoat fowl) for excising the sins of Jewish America certainly did not help them. The execution of the Rosenbergs served to propitiate the "gentiles" and especially to assuage the ire of J. Edgar Hoover who called the Rosenberg case the Crime of the Century.

Literature at its best is a defiance of destiny, a protest against oblivion. In the face of history's brutal logic, it offers the irresistible magic of dreams. Nowhere perhaps is this more poignantly evident than in Yiddish poetry, the late flower of European culture, which blossomed in the imperishable verse of Abraham Sutzkever, who turns ninety this year.

A virtuoso of poetic meter, rhyme and rhythm, Sutzkever has been called the "Ariel of Yiddish literature," whose voice, a mix of utter refinement and complexity, rises above the bloody crossroads of history. In "Vi Azoy?" he writes of "...black shrieks/ where shards of days shudder in spasm/ in a bottomless, roofless chasm..." As a Holocaust survivor, Sutzkever recounts the quintessential Jewish pilgrimage in the twentieth century from annihilation to renewal. The current YIVO-sponsored exhibit at the Center for Jewish History reveals the trajectory of his extraordinary life.

A descendant of renowned rabbinic and Hasidic figures, Sutzkever is a child of the twentieth century. His birth in 1913 in Smorgon, Poland nearly coincides with the outbreak of World War I. Early on he came to know displacement and dispossession. He and his family fled Vilna when he was an infant for the "relative safety" of Siberia. His kinship with nature was so powerful that in "Siberia," a book of poems illustrated by Marc Chagall, he invests the grimness of space with inimitable beauty.

In 1920, after his father died in Siberia of heart failure at the age of 30, the Sutzkevers returned to Vilna where Abraham received a traditional Jewish education. He came of age as a member of Yung Vilne (Young Vilna), an aspiring group of Yiddish writers who like himself were to leave an indelible impression on interwar Polish Jewish culture.

Sutzkever raised the standard of aesthetic perfection and avant-garde modernism, which often irked his contemporaries. However, in time, Sutzkever's genius won out. His unorthodox rhymes and verbal effects caught the attention of New York-based Yiddish poet Aaron Glanz Layeles, the leader of the In Zikhisten (Introspectivists) who sought to fuse form and content, feeling and rationality. They invited him to become a regular contributor to the landmark Yiddish journal, "In Zikh." Sutzkever's first book, "Lider" (Songs) appeared in 1937 to wide critical acclaim. In 1940 he published his second volume of poems "Valdeks" (Forest), a hymn to nature, further solidifying his reputation.

The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and two days later occupied Vilna. Imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto, Sutzkever risked his life to smuggle hundreds of rare books and manuscripts housed in YIVO, located at the time in Vilna. In the midst of tragedy, he continued to write poems of classical meter and perfect rhyme, hurling their beauty against the unspeakable barbarity of the Nazis. Here is an example from a poem focusing on Vilna's Rom printing press famed for its classical editions of the Babylonian Talmud:
Like fingers stretched out through the bars in the night To catch the free light of the air that is shed- We sneak in the dark to grab up, as in spite, The Rom printing plates, with old wisdom inbred. We dreamers now have to be soldiers and fight And melt into bullets the soul of the lead.

Sutzkever joined the Vilna Ghetto underground, smuggled weapons and taught Yiddish poetry. On September 12, 1943, he escaped the Vilna Ghetto and joined a partisan fighters unit. Surviving the most vicious of Nazi anti-guerilla offensives, he took refuge in the forest and the freezing waters of Lake Narocz. In 1944 he was airlifted out of the forests to Moscow where he inspired Dovid Bergelson and Peretz Markish, who later fell victim to Stalin. Meanwhile, Ilya Ehrenberg compared his work to a Greek tragedy and Boris Pasternak translated his poetry into Russian. Miraculously, Sutzkever retrieved the cultural treasures he had buried in Vilna and succeeded in sending them to New York where they constitute an integral part of Yoyo's archival holdings.

In 1947, Sutzkever arrived in British-occupied Palestine as part of the brioche, the Zionist illegal immigration. In 1948, he founded the leading Yiddish journal, "Die Golden Key" (The Golden Chain), which put literary Yiddish back on the map, a not inconsiderable feat in Israel where a hostile atmosphere made matelote unwelcome. Even in the midst of revival, Sutzkever continued to write imperishable verses about the vanished world of Vilna in such collections as "Yiddishe Gas" (Jewish Street) and "Geheymshtot" (Secret City).

Sutzkever at 90 is perhaps the last of a line of great Yiddish writers beginning in the nineteenth century with Mendele Mokher Sforim, Sholom Aleichem and Yehuda Leib Peretz. Though his literary forebears are hardly strangers to tragedy and suffering, Sutzkever's experience of cataclysm and genocide – he is a man for whom "rivers of blood" are not a metaphor -- surpasses anything they could have ever imagined. That Sutzkever responds with lyricism laced with lamentation to what he has witnessed serve as timely and eloquent proof of the incontestable power of literature as resistance and transcendence.

Demography, even at its best, is a quirky science. At this late date, we still do not know for certain just how many Jews there are in America. But of one thing we are sure: Germany has the fastest growing Jewish community in the world. In the past decade, Russian Jews have elected Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt over New York, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as their destination of choice. No other contemporary population statistic is as rude and revelatory as this latter-day migration, which has increased the numbers of Jews in Germany eight-fold in a mere ten years.

Historians and observers cannot but ponder this rich paradox. Russian Jews are heading to a nation that effectively turned much of Jewish Europe into a necropolis a mere sixty years ago. Yet there can be no doubt that Germany till 1933 was a dreamland of the Jewish people, a beacon for poor and struggling Russian Jews (Ostjuden in the less than affectionate term chosen for them by their co-religionists west of the Elbe) who viewed it as a homeland of kultur, bildung and emancipation. Today the cycle repeats itself.

It was precisely the blending of Germanic and Judeo-Yiddish characteristics that resulted in a rarely equaled level of cultural and scientific achievement. Out of this combination came many of the world's outstanding leaders. Hannah Arendt, Paul Ehrlich, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud (whose mome loshn literally was Yiddish), Heinrich Heine, Henry Kissinger, Max Liebermann, Rosa Luxumburg, Gustav Mahler, Karl Marx, Moses and Felix Mendelssohn, Adolph Ochs, Max Reinhardt, Sigmund Romberg, Arnold Schoenberg, Henrietta Szold, August Wassermann, Kurt Weill, Billy Wilder -- the list of extraordinary individuals of Germanic Jewish background is endless.

In the first years after the war the chain seemed irreparably broken. With memories of the Holocaust so fresh, except for such intellectual lights as Adorno and the like, few Jews born in Germany seriously considered going back. Who would want to return to the old neighborhoods and thereby release a flood of memories of what is no more? Jewish congregations in Germany were reestablished not by Germanized Jews but by Jews from Poland, Iran and Russia with whom echt German Jews had little in common.

Selma Plaut certainly felt that way. Selma left Germany before the outbreak of World War II, as did her sisters Ada and Alice. Until well into their nineties, the sisters used their German reparations money to spend a few weeks together every year at a spa that reminded them of the ones frequented in their youth. The cafes, the chocolatier, the Rosenthal china shops -- everything was much as they remembered it except for a cluster of guests of east European Jewish origin with whom they wanted nothing to do; as Germans they found their overall behavior appalling. After Sabbath services, when the exuberant east Europeans started carrying on in what sounded to their ears like Ebonics, in protest the old ladies walked out.

Jews from Germany who came back to stay had to make serious adjustments. Ruth Draeger came back. Ruth, a child of the '20s, grew up near Hamburg's Bornplatz Synagogue where as a young girl she attended services regularly. Next to the synagogue is Carlebach Plaza named after the synagogue's last rabbi, Joseph Carlebach, who died in 1942 in the Riga ghetto. On the site of the synagogue, badly damaged during Kristallnacht and later destroyed, there now stands a nondescript office building Ruth walks by every day on her way to her favorite café.

A few blocks from Carlebach Plaza is a tenement building (part of which today is a Jewish museum) where Ruth and many others were detained before being taken to the Hannoverscher Bahnhof and packed onto trains for “resettlement” in Riga, Treblinka, Terezin, Minsk and other places in the East. The Banjo looks much as Ruth remembers it did sixty years ago when she and her family were shipped off to Terezin.

Some German Jews, like Hellfried Heilbut, talk little about their Jewish past because there is so little to talk about. Hellfried, whose father edited a Social Democratic newspaper near Dresden, didn't know he was Jewish until his Nazi grade school teacher announced that fact in front of the class. Though Hellfire's hold on Judaism is at best tenuous, his daughter – whose mother is a German Lutheran -- lived in Israel for several years and is now an active member of the Jewish community of Frankfurt.

Hamburg has a different story to tell. Recently a native-born Hamburg Ian who survived Auschwitz was denied membership in Hamburg's only congregation, where Ostjuden predominate, for lack of a Jewish mother. Rather than being embraced as a fellow Jew, she is pushed away for being either too German or not Jewish enough.

And then there are the Warburgs. With roots in eighteenth century Hamburg, the investment-banking firm of M. M. Warburg & Co. occupies a handsome six-story building on Ferdinand Strasse in the heart of modern port city. The firm is headed by Max Warburg who grew up among mishpocha in America. Max, who speaks German and English flawlessly, returned to Hamburg some years ago to take over the family business. In the tradition of their family, Max and his wife, a convert to Judaism, are raising their four daughters Jewish to the point encouraging them to exercise noblisse oblige regarding the needs of their ostjudische Glaubensbrueder (east European co-religionists).

Jewish history is replete with binary opposites: Ashkenazim and Sephardim; Zionists and Bundists; Litvaks and Galitzianers. The list is legion, but no two terms have seemed so contrary as that of German and Russian Jewry. In the Old World as in the New, their interaction has been at once productive and pernicious, constituting a symbiosis of concern and contempt, envy and affection. In latter-day Germany, the old story is being told again. Although the new immigrants make up 70 percent of the registered Jews, none are represented on the executive board of the Central Council of German Jews and only two of the 16 chairmen of the individual Jewish state federations are Russian immigrants. In history as in fashion, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

For Jews the wages of messianism have proven bitterly prohibitive. Throughout centuries marked by relentless persecution, exile and banishment, attempts to designate a redeemer, however comprehensible and well-intentioned, have ended in communal grief. Be it in the first century of the Common Era, the seventeenth or in our own, efforts to hurry the redemption have generally met with disaster.

Shabbetai Zevi (1626-1676), a young, charismatic and enigmatic Jew born in Izmir (Smyrna) on the Aegean coast on the Ninth of Av (conforming with the tradition that the Messiah would be born on the anniversary of the destruction of the Holy Temples), became the subject of such intense messianic fervor as has rarely been seen in the Jewish world before or since. His life and teachings are documented in the collections of YIVO at the Center for Jewish History.

Steeped in the mystical writings of the Kabbalah, with its yearning for immediate and immanent communion with God, Shabbatai Zevi soon became a law unto himself. Before his first marriage at the age of twenty, a union never consummated, quoting Isaiah Shabbetai Zevi claimed to have levitated. A severe form of manic-depression led him to flagrant violation of rabbinic law. His sacrilege included marrying a Torah under the chuppah, dervish-like dancing, fainting spells and sudden disrobings. His visions, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the metaphysical to the olfactory, soon led him to declare himself the Messiah.

Banished by an outraged Smyrna rabbinate, Zevi began a peripatetic life that took him to Salonika, an old Kabbalist center, a city largely comprised of Jews, and then to Constantinople, Palestine and Cairo, where he won over Raphael Halebi, the prosperous and powerful treasurer of the Turkish governor. Wherever he went he gathered enthusiastic followers, often fairly prominent. Once assured of financial backing, Shabbetai Zevi returned triumphantly to Jerusalem where he finally met Nathan of Gaza, a twenty-year old recluse and scholar who shifted gears and became his most active champion, virtually the latter-day Elijah of Shabbateanism. In a fit of ecstasy, a kind of folie a deux, Nathan of Gaza brought matters to a fever pitch by prophesizing in 1665 the imminent restoration of the Jews via the bloodless victory of Shabbetai Zevi, riding on a lion with a seven-headed dragon in his jaws. He cited 1666 as the apocalyptic year, which would bring the end of time.

None of this messianic hoopla would have been possible were it not for the succession of tragedies that befell the Jews between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and culminating with the great wave of bitter anti-Semitic persecution in Poland and Russia which set in with the Chmielnicki massacres in 1648, Jewish communities across Europe, Asia and Africa proved rich soil for the growth and propagation of messianism.

The emergence of Safed in the sixteenth century as a center of Lurianic kabbalah, which yoked striking concepts with messianic ideas, and its spread in the seventeenth century set the stage for the outbreak of Shabbateanism that left the Jewish world reeling for generations. At its extremity, suffering and mysticism concocted a witches brew of disbelief and desecration.

Matters came to a head in the beginning of 1666 when Shabbetai Zevi found himself imprisoned by the Ottoman Turks at the Castle of Abydos in Constantinople. Given the unappealing choice of death or Islam, he chose the latter with the encouragement of the sultan's physician, himself an apostate Jew. The Sultan spared Shabbetai Zevi's life, renamed him Mehmed Effendi, appointed him as his personal doorkeeper and provided him with a generous allowance (a royal pension of 150 piasters per day).

Shabbetai Zevi's apostasy hit world Jewry with the force of a thunderclap. His conversion brought chaos in its wake. Some of his followers followed him into Islam, interpreting his betrayal as a form of "sacred sin," a necessary step in bringing the redemption. The Torah, they argued paradoxically, would be fulfilled by being flouted, the ultimate slippery slope. Cooler heads read the handwriting on the wall and found their way back to the fold of Judaism.

Periods of illumination and depression, accompanied by acts of libertinism and moral outrage, continued. Even though he had converted, Shabbatai continued to lead a double life, performing the duties of a Moslem but observing large segments of Judaism until his death in 1676 in Albania. The fire of Shabbateanism, however, did not pass with his demise but burned brightly for many years, guttering slowly before it was finally extinguished in the eighteenth century. Even today, his followers, the Donme, (a derisive term meaning Apostates or Turncoats) can still be found in parts of Asia Minor.

Perhaps nothing in Jewish history ever quite resembled the wild exultation and brazen vulgarity of Shabbateanism. The afflicted youth of Izmir braided light and dark, sin and redemption in a manner that rocked Judaism to its foundation. Not surprisingly, the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, not unsinged then or later by the flames of false redemption, declared with more than a bit of irony: "Mir hoben ibergelebt Haman, veln mir iberleben mosiakhn (We survived Haman; we'll survive the Messiah too)."

Gisela Blume is a convert to Judaism who has dedicated her life to the restoration and preservation of Fuerth's historic Jewish cemetery. In her work as a genealogist, she has acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of Fuerth's Jewish community from the sixteenth century to the founding of the first Jewish orphanage in Germany in 1762 by Israel Lichtenstaedter -- a direct ancestor of American Jewish Historical Society trustee Arthur Obermayer -- to its position up to the Nazi era as a center of manufacturing, learning and trade.

In 1800 Fuerth's 2,400 Jews constituted the fifth largest Jewish community in German-speaking Europe. Only Prague, Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfurt outranked it. By 1848 Fuerth's Jews constituted 17.5 percent of the general population. As late as 1935, 50% of the wholesalers, 14.5 % of the retailers and 23.1 % of the manufacturers in Fuerth were Jewish.

Some months ago Gisela Blume shared a few recollections with us around the table of her strictly kosher home in the center of what was once a thriving Jewish community. These recollections comprise but a tiny part of the Leo Baeck Institute's incredibly rich memoir accounts.

From 1662 the Jewish community of Fuerth employed scribes to keep death registers. When the Nazis came to power, they were collected together with the wedding and birth registers to prove who was Aryan and who was Jewish. They collected everything, microfilmed everything, and later destroyed the originals. The microfilms were found after the war in Berlin and are now in Jerusalem in the Center of the History of the Jewish People. I went through all these registers.

Written in both German and old fashioned Hebrew, they are not easy to read. But I found somebody to teach me how. And it was very interesting because in Hebrew it says Gittel daughter of such and such and the wife and widow of such and such, while in German it only says Gittel widow of the husband.

Fuerth's Jewish cemetery is one of the oldest and largest in all Germany. It was vandalised during Kristallnacht. Six years later to extinguish fires a sizeable area inside the cemetery was dug up and turned into a water pond. All the Jews of Fuerth had either fled or been deported by this time. After the war Jewish American soldiers along with survivors of nearby camps found many gravestones in the workshops of non-Jewish stone masons who would have removed the Jewish inscriptions and used them again. Former Nazis were forced to bring them back. The gravestones together with whatever bones could be found were put back but in no particular order, as there was no map, no register. I do what I can to preserve what remains as a resource for making Fuerth connections for countless families all over the world. There are many survivors, enough for Frank Harris from Westchester to organise annual Catskill events for hundreds of Jews from Fuerth.

Hitler came to Fuerth once, before the Nazis took over. He flew in and was taken by car right through the city and people threw tomatoes at him. He never entered Fuerth again; however, later on Fuerth was no better than any other Franconian city. During Kristallnacht the entire Shulhof complex (synagogue complex) was burned down; Jewish shops along Schwabacher Strasse were destroyed and looted; men had their beards cut off. In the Shoah at least 886 Jews from Fuerth were killed. After the liberation 40 survivors returned. Today there is a new Jewish congregation.v Fuerth's Isrealitische Realshule opened in 1869. Its most famous student was Henry Kissinger, born Heinz on May 27, 1923 in a small apartment at Mathildenstrasse 23. Kissinger's father Louis initially was a teacher in the public girl's high school. My mother was one of his students. Later he became a teacher at the Israelitische Realschule until the family immigrated to America in 1938.

After the war Henry Kissinger came back with his father and mother. Naturally, he was taken to the girl's high school and he happened to be taken to the class where my daughter was. She lifted her hand and said, 'Herr Kissinger: My grandmother was a student of yours and she sends her best regards to you.' And he asked, 'What is her name?' 'Haegendoerfer,' my daughter said. And like right out of a pistil he said, 'Fraegl oder Anna Marie?' -- my mother or my aunt, both of whom had Herr Kissinger as their teacher so many years ago. In May 1998, in memory of his family, Henry Kissinger accepted honorary citizenship of his place of birth.

Religious tolerance is the cornerstone of American democracy. The nation's ethos of fairness and freedom would be inconceivable without the civic pledge inscribed in the very language of the Declaration of Independence-"that all men are created equal"-enduring lines written by Thomas Jefferson, its chief architect and author and third president of the United States. Widely acknowledged to be among the wisest of the early Founding Fathers, Jefferson stayed the course of freedom, advocating essential liberties and steering the ship of state with equal measures of sobriety and sagacity.

Jefferson's intellectual integrity and steadfast rationalism are seen again in full flower in his May 28, 1818 letter to Mordecai Manuel Noah, a restless and at times combative journalist, diplomat, human rights defender and nonpareil publicist. Perhaps the most influential American Jew of the first half of the nineteenth century and a model for engaged Jewish leadership in subsequent generations, Noah was a proto-Zionist who tried unsuccessfully to establish a colony for oppressed Jews on Grand Island near Buffalo. When that failed, he was one of the first Jews in America to turn to Palestine as a place of refuge. Today every schoolchild in Israel knows his name.

The former president's letter has served down the centuries as a bulwark against religious prejudice and a guarantee of freedom of worship. In 1986 the prized Jefferson letter was purchased by the German-born Ludwig Jesselson and deeded to the Yeshiva University Museum, where it is preserved under pristine conditions when not on display.

Responding to a copy of Mordecai Noah's "Discourse," a speech Noah delivered at the consecration of Congregation Shearith Israel's new synagogue building in what is now east Chelsea, and a copy of which Noah sent to the former President, Jefferson stresses the importance of the inalienable right of Jews and other religious minorities to be treated as equals among equals in America. "I have read [your letter] with pleasure and instruction," Jefferson writes, "having learned from it some valuable facets in Jewish history which I did not know before. Your sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance, inherent in every sect, disclaimed by all while feeble and practiced by all when in power. Our laws have applied the only antidote to the vice, protecting our religious, as they do our civil rights by putting all on an equal footing. But more remains to be done."

Jefferson's sympathetic answer came in response to the heartfelt eloquence expressed in Noah's "Discourse." The American Jewish leader declared to the august members of Shearith Israel: "Bigotry and superstition, that bane to humanity, … continued to be exercised, and its effects felt by the Jews, until a dawn of philosophy enlightened the world, and a ray of hope broke in upon them…Those indignities have now been abandoned; and, for the first time, in eighteen centuries, it may be said that the Jew feels that he was born equal, and is entitled to equal protection…"

In response, Jefferson underscores the importance of education as a civilizing force, echoing Noah's contention of the essential congruity of American and Jewish ideals and interests: "It is to be hoped that dispositions will at length mould themselves to the model of the law, and consider the moral basis on which all our religions rest, as the rallying point which unites them in a common interest…nothing I think would be so likely to effect this as to your sect particularly as the more careful attention to education, which you recommend, and which placing its members on the equal and commanding benches of science, will exhibit them as equal objects of respect and favour."

Few American documents express with more considered eloquence the comprehensive emancipation Jews have striven for on this side of the Atlantic. Coming a generation after President Washington's famous response to Moses Seixas, the president of Touro Synagogue, declaring that the American government "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance," Jefferson's missive reaffirms yet again the centrality of religious tolerance to the American way of life. Writing in his capacity as an individual citizen, but with the moral weight and authority of the presidency behind him, Jefferson espouses the ideals that have made this nation the greatest democratic republic in history.

At a time of rising religious fanaticism and intolerance, the Jefferson/Jesselson letter is a timely reminder of the bounteous freedom American Jews have enjoyed in a land that continues to be the world's second chance at decency and democracy, and will continue to be so as long as the beacon of liberty shines alike for people of all ethnicities, religions and philosophies.

PART ONE

Significant political events often summon forth larger-than-life figures and the inevitable clash of titans. Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, is a tale of international sweep, crammed with longing, passion and, above all, personality. Such contending colossi as Brandeis and Weizmann, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, and Wise and Silver bestride the stage of modern Jewish history and the drama of the creation of a Jewish state.

None, perhaps, proved as contentious as Stephen S. Wise, founder of the Free Synagogue and the American and World Jewish Congresses and an early advocate of tikkun (the repair of the world) through Social Action and Zionism, and Abba Hillel Silver who replaced him as American Jewry's principal Zionist spokesman during the fateful years of 1943-1948. The change from Wise to Silver was cataclysmic, constituting a shift from a moderate to a militant approach in garnering American support for the creation of a Jewish homeland.

Ironically Wise, who by 1943 was the epitome of moderation, started out his long career as a radical militant, though one would not have known it from his background. Wise was born in 1874 and brought as a baby from Hungary to New York where his father, the recipient of a doctorate from the University of Leipzig, assumed the pulpit of Rodeph Sholom, one of New York's leading "Our Crowd" congregations.

In the 1890s, Wise took a courageous step by becoming a Zionist at a time when the idea of a Jewish Homeland was looked upon with great suspicion, especially by assimilated Reform Jews who, eschewing the specter of duel loyalties, declared in effect: "America is our Zion and Washington our Jerusalem."

In spite of such views, Wise together with Richard Gottheil, a Columbia University professor whose father was chief rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, founded America's first Zionist federation in New York in 1897, one year after Herzl's historic First Zionist Congress in Basel.

In 1898, five years after receiving smicha (being ordained) in Vienna, Wise attended the second Zionist Congress as a correspondent for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. After meeting with Herzl, Wise wrote back to Gottheil: "This is a cause that will allow Jews to fight back. We have been stepped on long enough."

Where Wise made his mark in America was in translating his refusal to being stepped on as a Jew into his every-bit-as-passionate refusal to tolerate other Americans being stepped on. This was the basis of his commitment to social activism. Thus, in the early 1900's he served not only as a rabbi in Portland, Oregon, but also as State Commissioner of Child Labor, an unpaid position which he turned into a pulpit for fighting liquor, gambling, and prostitution interests by pointing the finger at municipal and state corruption. A frequent guest speaker before Christian audiences, Wise, like Silver after him, was something of a matinee idol.

A few weeks after coming to New York in 1905, Wise made front-page news by turning down an offer to serve as rabbi of Temple Emanu-El. When asked by an Emanu-El director to explain what Wise meant by a "free pulpit," wielding words as weapons Wise held forth as follows:

"I have in Oregon been among the leaders of a civic reform movement. Mr. Moses, your nephew, Mr. Herman, is to be a Tammany Hall candidate for a Supreme Court judgeship. I would if I were Emanu-El's rabbi oppose his candidacy in and out of my pulpit. Mr. Guggenheim, as a member of the Child Labor Commission of the state of Oregon, if it ever came to be known that children were being employed in your mines, I would speak out against such wrong. And Mr. Marshall, you and your firm are counsel for the Equitable Life Assurance Company. Knowing that Charles Evans Hughes's investigation of insurance companies in New York has been a very great service, I would in and out of my pulpit condemn the crimes committed by insurance."

"How can a rabbi be vital and independent and helpful," Wise added, "if he be tethered and muzzled?" A generation later Abba Hillel Silver would pose the very same question to Wise in his dealings as a Zionist with the FDR administration.

PART TWO: THE ROAD TO ZION

For American Jewish leaders of the first half of the 20th century, the battle for Zion and the struggle for civil rights was one and the same fight. Prompted by biblical precept and ethical imperative, the struggles proved long and arduous, in each case demanding titanic efforts and culminating in hard-won success. Zionism and justice were thus woven of the same divine fabric.

America's principal Jewish advocate for social justice and interfaith relations for over forty years, Stephen S. Wise often spoke out from his Free Synagogue pulpit on behalf of the disadvantaged. As a founder of the NAACP, Wise vehemently attacked grandfather clauses blocking voting rights for Blacks, as well as discriminatory practices in hospitals, the armed forces, labor unions, and educational institutions.

Wise soon joined a likeminded circle of liberal-minded Jews largely of Central European heritage known as the Brandeis Group. In addition to Louis D. Brandeis, members included Henry Morgenthau, Nathan Straus, Julian Mack, Felix Frankfurter, Chaim Weizmann and a young Abba Hillel Silver who, as activist rabbi of Cleveland‘s Temple-Tifereth, had caught the group's attention. The Brandeis Group supported Wise's outspoken views on Black rights just as vehemently as it backed Harvard Law School Professor Frankfurter's defense of Sacco and Vanzetti over the objections of Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, originator in the 1920s of Harvard's quota system against Jews.

As a protestor of the abrogation of the rights of Jews, Wise showed great courage and determination in organizing a mass protest at Madison Square Garden shortly after Hitler's election as chancellor. He did this despite dire warnings by Joseph Proskauer of the American Jewish Committee that "the blood of German Jewry" would be on Wise's hands and the prediction by Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald Tribune that the protest would "undermine fatally the position of the liberal opposition in the persecuting countries."

In the matter of a Jewish homeland, Wise had to weigh his words carefully lest he alienate President Franklin Roosevelt with whom he had cultivated a warm relationship over the years. To attack Hitler was doing FDR a favor, as the Hollywood moguls were quick to discover, but to push to the same degree for a Jewish homeland might put undue stress on FDR's ties to Palestine's League of Nations-appointed mandate, Britain, for whom, unlimited Jewish migration was tantamount to causing major Arab disruptions. Wise at every opportunity did what he could to persuade FDR to openly support the right of Jews to freely migrate to a future Jewish homeland in Palestine. Ever equivocating, FDR never did.

Initially, Wise and Silver complemented one another as social activists and American Zionists -- Wise as the older sage, Silver as the younger disciple. Born in 1893 in Lithuania into a family of soap and cosmetics manufacturers, Silver was taken to the United States in 1902 and grew up on the Lower East Side where his father eked out a living as a Hebrew School teacher. In 1904, shortly after Theodor Herzl‘s death, Silver co-founded the Dr. Herzl Zion Club where, in the heart of Yiddish-speaking America, Silver and his chums conversed with one another in Hebrew. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College, Silver served as rabbi of Cleveland's prestigious Temple-Tifereth from 1917 until his death in 1973. The first president of Cleveland's Bureau of Jewish Education, Silver was also a member of the Chamber of Commerce until he left to side openly with labor.

Impressed with so exemplary a record, Stephen S. Wise and other prominent members of the Brandeis Group encouraged Silver to intensify his involvement in American Zionist affairs. He did so as a member of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) until 1921 when Chaim Weizmann was chosen over Louis D. Brandeis as its principal spokesman. Resigning, Silver and other Brandeis Group members resurfaced as the Palestine Development League (PDL) "for the social economic up building (sic) of Palestine so that it may be populated within a comparatively short time by a preponderance of self-supporting Jews." As head of the PDL, Silver grew adept at circumventing ZOA dictates.

In the wake of Brandeis's defeat by Weizmann, Wise garnered support in Jewish America as a moderate Zionist. This was in sharp contrast with Palestinian militants like David Ben Gurion who, with Herzl to guide him, looked upon a Jewish state as the ultimate goal of the Jewish people.

In the pre-war years both Wise and Silver viewed the continuation of Jewish existence in the Diaspora and the establishment of a spiritual center in Palestine as two parallel tasks of equal importance for the Jewish people. Unlike Ben Gurion for whom time was running out, Wise and Silver predicted that Zion would come about "not by might or by power but by the spirit." All that changed in the war years, but not right away.

War is history's most powerful accelerant, bringing to a rapid boil those social and political forces relatively latent during peacetime. The outbreak of World War II and the subsequent horrors of the Holocaust thrust the fate of Zionism, the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, front and center onto the stage of American Jewish life and quickened the pace of its development. Inevitably, it would radically redraw the political landscape and shift the fortunes of the titans bestriding it.

As chairman of the United Palestine Appeal during the war years, Abba Hillel Silver served as America's chief Zionist fundraiser. As such, Silver supported ZOA president Solomon Goldman as late as 1940 in opposing illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine, lest President Franklin Roosevelt's relations with Britain be upset as it fought alone in the war against Nazi Germany.

Increasingly, Silver grew to resent Wise for gaining the ear of FDR only to have the President contradict his promises behind closed doors in his talks with the British. Silver gradually became convinced that only the threat of suffering politically would keep FDR from going back on his word to American Jewry.

Whereas Wise counseled moderation, Silver preferred a more militant approach. Instead of ingratiating himself with the administration, he envisioned the Democrats and Republicans outbidding each other for the Jewish vote. Thus in 1944, over Wise's objections, Silver was instrumental in adding to each party's platform the Taft-Wagner resolution pressing for abrogation of the 1939 white paper restrictions against Jewish immigration to Palestine and urging the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish commonwealth.

When David Ben Gurion visited America in 1940, Silver had already attracted a loyal legion of followers, known as the Silverites. Ben-Gurion, as chairman of the Jewish Agency's Palestine Executive, met with Silver. Immediately, he recognized in Silver the right person to ignite the flame of Zionism in the hearts of Jewish America. Ben Gurion had been told by a trusted Zionist colleague, Moshe Shertok, that American Jews "show deep feeling and a basic natural loyalty for our cause, but this feeling is not utilized or put to practical ends. " Another trusted colleague, Eliahu Golomb, is quoted in Howard Sachar's "A History of the Jews of America" as saying to Ben Gurion around this same time: "Zionist feelings are much stronger among American Jews than it would appear. [However,] the American Jew thinks of himself first and foremost as an American citizen. Loyalty to America is now the supreme watchword." With Silver at the helm, Ben Gurion hoped to change all that.

In 1941, with Ben Gurion's encouragement, the Cos Cob Formula advocating, "unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine which a Jewish majority may organize into an autonomous commonwealth" was signed at a meeting of prominent Jews in the Connecticut town of that name. Though vetoed by the American Jewish Committee, the Formula was resurrected at the Biltmore Conference in May 1942.

Ben Gurion and Silver set the tone for the Conference by calling unequivocally for a Jewish army and the transformation of postwar Palestine into an independent Jewish commonwealth. "The day of appeasement is passed," the ZOA organ "The New Palestine " declaimed. "Zionism must recover the missionary zeal of its early years." Ben Gurion and Silver were in the ascendancy.

On August 1, 1942, less than three months after the Biltmore Conference, Gerhart Riegner, Swiss representative to the Wise-founded World Jewish Congress, learned of Hitler's plan to exterminate all of Europe's Jews, even specifying the instrument of murder as Zyklon B gas. Due to State Department interference, Wise was told nothing for nearly a month and then only in exchange for his promise to remain silent until the news was confirmed.

Wise did so for three months before holding a press conference. Of the nineteen largest newspapers in America, only ten, mostly in the East, reported the news at all, and then largely on the back pages. "I beg you, Mr. President," Wise appealed to FDR, "as the recognized leader of the forces of democracy and humanity. to initiate the action which … may yet save the Jewish people from utter destruction." Roosevelt's response was typically vague, promising his government's determination to help victims of persecution, insofar as "the burden of war permits."

The enormity of the Holocaust not only destroyed much of European Jewry but left humanity's moral compass in shambles. Time-tested responses no longer proved adequate against state-sponsored genocide. Careful deliberation, diplomatic decorum, backdoor channel--the cherished posture of American Jewish leadership in less cataclysmic times--could scarcely serve in the face of gas chambers and crematoria. Little wonder that few reputations remained intact in the horrific wake of World War II.

In November, 1942 Stephen S. Wise brought news of the Holocaust to America before pleading with FDR "to initiate the action which ... may yet save the Jewish people from utter destruction." Roosevelt's response was typically vague, promising his government's determination to help victims of persecution, insofar as "the burden of war permits."

Some months later at an American Jewish conference of Zionist and non-Zionist leaders held at the Waldorf-Astoria, Abba Hillel Silver launched into a savage attack of Wise. Berating him for sacrificing "principle" to expediency, Silver called Wise's brand of compromise for the sake of unity a sham and the issue of free immigration a snare because of its dependence upon the good will of the great powers.

Pounding the lectern, Silver went on to declare: "There is but one solution for national homelessness. That is a national home. ... From the infested, typhus-ridden ghetto of Warsaw, from the death-block of Nazi-occupied lands, where myriads of our people are awaiting execution by the slow or the quick method, from a hundred concentration camps which befoul the map of Europe, from the pitiful ranks of our wandering hosts over the entire face of the earth, comes the cry: Enough! There must be a final end to this, a sure and certain end." With this speech Silver captured the hearts and minds of Jewish America.

Though Silver and Wise continued to co-chair the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), America's premier Zionist agency during World War II, Silver was clearly in charge. In October, 1943, Silver organized mass meetings, surprisingly similar to Wise's anti-Nazi protests in the thirties, in New York and other large cities. The next month 118 rallies were held throughout the nation. Yet Roosevelt's indecision continued unabated. A month before his death, FDR met for two hours with Bernard Baruch and declined once more to publicly support open migration to Palestine.

Undeterred, Silver through AZEC continued rallying U. S. support of a sovereign Jewish state. In a matter of months, Silver won over a large sector of American public opinion. Meanwhile, AZEC was assisting the "illegal" immigration of survivors to Palestine and their struggle for a Jewish state.

Though Silver's militant Zionism often worked, occasionally it backfired, as during a July 1946 White House meeting when Silver pounded his fist on President Truman's desk. From then on the president refused to see him. Had not cooler heads prevailed, Truman might not have come to the fateful decision of recognizing Israel, by which time the careers of both Wise and Silver had been eclipsed.

Wise by now was too ill to do much of anything, and as for Silver, even though he spoke eloquently on behalf of a Jewish state before the UN in 1947, "he and other diaspora Zionists," notes Mark Raider in an invaluable collection of essays edited by him, Jonathan Sarna and Ronald Zweig, "were soundly defeated by the political machine of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion." Moreover, in the eyes of a now Federation-dominated American Jewish consensus, Silver had become extraneous.

Their political eclipse notwithstanding, we have not done proper justice to the memories of Wise or Silver, for as much as any other leaders of Jewish America of the twentieth century they strengthened our confidence in ourselves by expanding our social and political consciousness.

For many a lover of Yiddish, YIVO, the foremost international research center of its kind, is synonymous with the birth of consciousness. Its unrivaled archival collections have served scholars, writers, dreamers and idealists for nearly eighty years as an entry portal to Jewish life. Few have benefited from and contributed as much to its scholarly efflorescence as Daniel Soyer, a leading authority on landsmanshaftn who guided us through the dramatic history of YIVO and his own coming-of-age story.

On a recent sunny winter day, we sat in his cramped office at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University and soon found ourselves immersed in the long and distinguished chronicle of YIVO. Founded in 1925 at a conference of Jewish scholars in Berlin, a bevy of academic luminaries chose Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, as the home of this new democratic institution of learning. YIVO's mandate was not only to make the results of world scholarship available to Yiddish-speaking Jews but also to allow young and emerging scholars to actively participate in a new universe of secular Jewish research.

From its outset, YIVO set out to acquire and collect Jewish books, periodicals, family and communal records—every kind of personal and public documentation that could shed light on a people and its civilization. Max Weinreich, a graduate of the University of Marburg, was YIVO's guiding light. He, as so many of the founding fathers of YIVO, sought to foster a vibrant link between the summits of scholarship and the broad valley of Jewish daily life.

Under his tutelage, an army of home-based zamlers (collectors) gathered materials covering the length and breadth of Eastern Europe to capture the hum and buzz of Jewish life in the great urban centers as well as in the tiniest hamlets. During the crucial interwar years, Weinreich launched an autobiographical project in which hundreds of young Jews were encouraged to record their stories of daily life.

YIVO had a mere fifteen years of relative peace in which to amass ethnographic material about a world, which, alas, was teetering on the edge of destruction. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and especially with the Nazi occupation of Vilna in the early summer of 1941, YIVO, as the rest of Eastern European Jewry, was engulfed by a raging tide of murder and mayhem. Forced to close its doors, YIVO was terrorized, its members killed. Under the noses of the Nazis, its remnant staff hid as much as possible of the institution's vital cache of books and archives. The German design to haul much of YIVO's priceless collections westward for the purpose of setting up a "museum to an extinct race" was sabotaged by such men as Abraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski, who succeeded in salvaging many of YIVO's treasures before escaping the Vilna Ghetto and fighting with the partisans in the forests of Poland and Lithuania.

Reaching New York in 1940, Weinreich soon began expanding the American branch of YIVO into the institution's flagship. After the war he supervised the retrieval of tens of thousands of books and archival folders sent from Europe for scholarly safekeeping. Fortuitously, Weinreich secured the purchase of the former Vanderbilt mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. "In those days," Soyer observed, "no one wanted an old-fashioned mansion on Fifth Avenue, which is why so many of them ended up as cultural institutions." By 1990, YIVO's collection boasted 23 million items of Jewish interest and a library of some 355,000 volumes.

Daniel Soyer is the 46-year-old grandson and grandnephew of American realist artists Moses and Raphael Soyer. Reared in Sunnyside, a predominantly Catholic Queens neighborhood with "a small colony of liberal-minded Jews, which is how we ended up there," Soyer grew up in an assimilated home. As an adolescent in the seventies, he became active in a variety of causes. "At the same time, I started to try to link up my politics to an affirmative Jewish identity." Soyer set about becoming proficient in Yiddish, first under the auspices of the Workmen's Circle and later at the intensive Uriel Weinreich language program at Columbia.

After graduating from Oberlin, Soyer took on a part time job as a YIVO switchboard operator. "At YIVO, I felt I had discovered an authentic world, people for whom Jewish ness was intrinsic to their very being, for whom language, ethnicity and national awareness were one and the same thing." Soyer soon became a YIVO archivist. "You could spend a career researching the YIVO archives," Soyer told us. In point of fact, he has done so, initially by dedicating himself to the study of landsmanshaftn, the immigrant organizations that helped the Yiddish-speaking Jews become American "on their own terms."

Perhaps no American Jewish communal institution paved the way for citizenship as effectively as the Landsmanshaftn. These mutual aid societies, voluntary associations based on members’ shared origins in an Eastern European city or town, proved to be incubators of democracy, nurturing new storm-tossed arrivals into a world of American freedom and enfranchisement.

Fordham University history professor Daniel Soyer, whose "Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York 1880-1939" was awarded the Thomas J. Wilson Prize by Harvard University and the Saul Viener Prize by the American Jewish Historical Society, conducted most of the research for his book at YIVO. Soyer discovered Jewish New York burgeoned with around 3000 Landsmanshaftn numbering over 400,000 members during its heyday in the early twentieth century. Indeed, prior to World War II, every fourth Jew in New York belonged to a Landsmanshaft. Jewish immigrants hailing from such urban centers as Bialystok or Minsk often were represented by a score or more of different associations. Even the tiniest shtetl did not go unrepresented in the New World.

Although Jews were not the only group to develop immigrant associations, they benefited greatly from them. Indeed, Landsmanshaftn proved to be the building blocks of citizenship, the proving ground of American adaptation and adjustment. Their democratic structure and election process, often borrowed from German American models, differed from the heavy-handedness of the charitable societies of the Old World.

No human requirement went untended. A Landsmanshaft provided aid for the rabbi and Talmud torah back home as well as a synagogue and cheder for its members and their children in the New World. In additional to spiritual considerations, immigrants "in noyt" had to be helped to get on their feet and face new challenges. They were the recipients from their local Landsmanshaft or a regional Federation of medical services, free loans, death benefits, funeral expenses, cemetery plots and much more.

Landsmanshaftn, Soyer explains, were little American republics in the making, which, not surprisingly, came to regard America itself as a kind of Landsmanshaft writ large. Here, amidst a safe environment, which often resembled elaborate "schmooze fests," members could imbibe American civic culture on their own terms by electing officers by secret ballot, enjoying free and unfettered debate, and following the rudiments of parliamentary procedure. Liberty, equality and republicanism could be digested, as it were, in bite-sized pieces. Yet, significantly these groupings, a kind of test tube of American civility, served as a controlled environment that helped immigrants to transcend the limitations of ethnicity. Soyer writes: "In particular, they strongly identified with the tradition that considered American nationality to be an outgrowth of shared principles rather than common racial or ethnic antecedents."

Associations set aside their differences during and after World War I, when pogroms, starvation and dislocation scarred the lives of millions of Eastern European Jews. As soon as their newly Americanized brethren realized the extent of the calamity, they shifted into high gear to help their desperate kinsmen across the sea. Soyer calls this era "the heroic period" of the Landsmanshaftn, a time when "American Jews quickly recognized that the war in Europe gave them a special international responsibility."

With the horrors of the Holocaust and the post-war birth of the State of Israel, voluntary associations often expanded their loyalty from local hometown to the new Jewish homeland. They strove, as well, to locate and aid the shea’rat ha’playta, the survivors of the Holocaust, some of whom joined existing Landsmanshaftn after reaching America while others set up their own associations, with special emphasis placed on annual commemorations honoring the memory of the six millions Jews murdered in Europe.

With the dying off of our bubbes and zaydes, existing Landsmanshaftn have become fewer and fewer until now they exist mainly in our collective memories. This gives us all the more reason to treasure YIVO's Landsmanshaft collection, consisting of everything from charters, certificates of incorporation and legal documents to minutes of regular, special and executive meetings, membership records, and cemetery maps. It is but one of hundreds of examples of YIVO functioning as a center for the study of the experiences of ordinary Jews. Cecile Kuznitz, Professor of History at Bard College and a former YIVO Fellow, describes YIVO’s founders as seeing themselves "creating a scholarship for the folk that would stand in distinction to existing models. By focusing on the lives of ordinary Jews the Institute’s scholarship would raise their consciousness of their own history and culture, becoming a form of self-knowledge."

What YIVO set about doing 80 years ago for our forefathers and mothers, it continues to do for us today. The YIVO Archives currently houses a total of about 1400 collections consisting of manuscripts, correspondence, and printed materials as well as photographs, films, videotapes, sound recordings, art works, and artifacts. Serving for generations as our collective east European consciousness, YIVO deserves our continued support.

Music, the quintessential art of duration, has been a Jewish specialty throughout the ages. Beholden as much to the beat as to the book, Jews crafted a temporal art form to soar beyond the confines of space and time. From King David strumming a harp down to our latter-day tunesmiths, the gift for soulful sound and joyful noise has proliferated among Jews, but perhaps never quite so much as in Vienna where for generations Jews reigned near supreme in every aspect of the world of music.

Yeshiva University Museum's exhibition "Vienna: Jews and the City of Music, 1870-1938" originated in the Austrian capital's Jewish Museum. It presents a compelling narrative of manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs, paintings and audio recordings, a roster of cultural achievement, which can be further explored, just across the hall in the rich archives of the Leo Baeck Institute.

Leon Botstein, the exhibition's scholarly advisor and co-editor with Werner Hanak of its informative catalogue, writes of Vienna's "tragedy and irony" of success. Immigrant Jews, outsiders who arrived from the provinces, distinguished themselves across the entire spectrum of musical production and consumption, helping to transform Vienna into the signature city of music and a world capital of modernism. In the end, they were rewarded for their exertions by exile, expulsion and extermination.

Viennese Jews regarded music as the highest of the arts, "the noblest expression of the human soul and the finest and deepest form of life that justified one's faith in the transcendence and universality of human experience." They comprised a third of the students of the city's conservatories and more than half of its music audiences. Jewish children acquired musical instruction at rates exceeding three times that of the non-Jewish population.

Indeed, the very idea of Vienna as a fairy tale city of music was in good part a Jewish invention, an urban myth so powerful that Orson Welles could say that "the Vienna that never was is the greatest city ever." Leo Fall, Edmund Eysler, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kalman were a few of the talented operetta composers who created the image of a light-hearted city of perpetual hedonism. The Viennese librettist Victor Leon underscored the connection between the bittersweet pleasures of operetta and Jewish history. "The audience for operetta wants to laugh beneath tears—and that is exactly what Jews have been doing for the last two thousand years since the destruction of Jerusalem."

Viennese Jews proved to be as much virtuosos of taste and talent as of social and cultural assimilation. Music, the most rapid and successful means of acculturation, at times even served as religion's formal exit ticket. In 1897 Gustav Mahler converted to Catholicism in order to ensure his appointment as director of the prestigious Court Opera, Vienna's musical crown jewel. A year later, the modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg converted to Protestantism, which was an equally wrenching break with tradition and ancestry. Even those that stayed within the fold were subject to the winds of change. Salomon Sulzer, Vienna's Oberkantor, the head cantor of its first synagogue from 1826 to 1881, convinced Franz Schubert to compose choral music for the synagogue service and nearly succeeded in having Beethoven do the same.

Reactionaries of the exclusionary kind cast aspersions on the pioneers of new music such as Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg. Few things rocked musical Vienna as much the "Skandalkonzert" conducted by Schoenberg on March 31,1913. Precedent-shattering works by Berg, Weber, Zemlinsky, as well as Schoenberg's own "Kammersymphonie," evoked such bitter howls of protest as to cut the concert short.

Vienna had long since fallen victim to a peculiarly virulent form of Wagnerian anti-Semitism, cultural racism fed by local resentments. In 1881, in the immediate aftermath of the horrific Ringtheater fire that claimed 900 lives, mostly Jewish, the master of Bayreuth mused that a new theater ought to be built and another fire deliberately set to consume even more Jews. The election of the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger as Vienna's mayor in 1897 only made matters worse. A Nazified Vienna increasingly made Jews unwelcome. When Schoenberg left Berlin in 1933 he deliberately avoided the Austrian capital, the scene of his greatest success, and headed for Paris, where he returned to Judaism. His reconversion certificate, signed by Marc Chagall, is on view.

Yet as late as 1936 Josef Schmidt, the Jewish-born operetta star, posed in front of Vienna's grand Ferris wheel for a large poster dedicated to the film, "Heut ist der schönste Tag in meinem Leben (Today is the most beautiful day of my life)." Six years later he was dead in an internment camp.

Gustav Mahler, the conductor and composer who brought the venerable tradition of the Austro-German symphony to its grand finale, was among the most brilliant stars in Vienna's musical galaxy. An evangelist of late romanticism, he stood at the crossroad of European music and served as a forerunner of twentieth century composition, themes sounded in the current exhibition. Fellow composers Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Britten had the highest regard for him, as did fellow conductors Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and, in later years, Leonard Bernstein. Mahler's life and achievement can be further explored in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute which houses a trove of his letters, concert programs, as well as the first-day cover of an Austrian stamp issued in his honor.

A descendant of Moravian Jewry, Mahler converted to Catholicism to obtain the chief post at the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, his entry ticket into the highest echelons of musical Mitteleuropa. Living at the epicenter of culture inevitably created a host of existential contradictions. Mahler wrote with typical anguish: "I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout all the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed."

His triple alienation was further aggravated by a turbulent childhood. One of fourteen children of a rising petit bourgeois tavern keeper and his frail wife, Mahler was born in 1860 in Kalischt, Bohemia. He soon moved to Iglau, a provincial city where he witnessed the death of seven of his siblings and his parent's continuous marital discord. When asked what he wished to become, the ten-year old Gustav answered "a martyr." His unsettling childhood laid the groundwork for his later musical signature—death-haunted irony, tension and skepticism.

Mahler managed to turn the dross of misery into the gold of music. He became an operatic conductor of genius, climbing the provincial circuit, until he reached the pinnacle of Austro-Hungarian music, the Vienna Court Opera, with the backing of Brahms and the opposition of a cohort of anti-Semites, including Cosima Wagner. Although his secular boyhood eased his conversion to Catholicism, he never forgot his Jewish roots. Max Brod, Kafka's friend and rescuer of his manuscripts, went so far as to say that Mahler's music was an embodiment of the diasporic Jewish soul.

Leon Botstein, co-author of the Yeshiva University's masterly exhibition catalogue and himself an international conductor, argues against Brod's posture of special pleading and rhetorical inflation, insisting instead that Mahler sought a universal spirituality drawing as much upon early as late Romanticism. The Frankfurt School theoretician and philosopher Theodor Adorno underscored in a famous essay that the Viennese composer drew on a profound self-understanding of being a victim.

Mahler's claim on musical immortality rests above all with his voluminous compositions. Although initially reviled by musical philistines as a babel of sound and dismissed high-handedly as "strudel music," his ten symphonies proved to be an oeuvre of compelling density and category-defying complexity.

The lure of a far better salary and easier circumstances drew him to New York. In 1907 he became the head of the Metropolitan Opera and a year later of the New York Philharmonic. His rigorous, dictatorial style—he despised lazy, self-satisfied amateurism—sapped his energy and hope. On the manuscript of his Tenth Symphony Mahler had scrawled the anguished exclamation: "My God, why has thou forsaken me!"

If Mahler felt himself forsaken by God, he was ultimately rescued by man. Fifty years after his death in 1910 his star had fully risen again. Championed by New York Philharmonic's Leonard Bernstein among others, his music was brilliantly interpreted with both "organic lushness" and modernist astringency. It is perhaps fitting that New York, Vienna's successor city, proved the site of Mahler's secular canonization. After the blood tide of history had dimmed, the baton had, as it were, traveled across the Atlantic; the Hudson rather than the Danube would now become the vital scene of new era of vibrant music and urbanity.

From the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, the Loeb family and their forbears have etched a permanent place into the nation's history, leaving an indelible mark on American business acumen, civic conscience and national duty. In this landmark 350th anniversary year of the arrival of the first Jews to New York, it is well to remember that the scope of the Loeb's history parallels in the main that of American Jewry"

The Loeb family archives, which have been donated to the American Jewish Historical Society and constitute one of its finest possessions, are a comprehensive guide and inventory to one of America's foremost German Jewish dynasties. This vast collection of letters, portraits and documents serves as a kind of "gilded attic" to the collective world of "Our Crowd."

Indeed, the late John Loeb Sr. and his wife Frances (widely known as Peter), whose lives were dedicated to the joys, privileges and responsibilities of rank, epitomized charm, elegance and accomplishment. Their marriage on November 18, 1926 in the Fifth Avenue mansion of Peter's grandfather Adolph Lewisohn, after whom Lewisohn Stadium was named, marked the confluence of two of the most esteemed German Jewish families in America—the Lehmans and the Loebs—and launched a seventy year alliance that embodied extraordinary devotion to the verities of family, culture, and philanthropy.

The art of marrying well, a leitmotif of the "Our Crowd" story, is beautifully underscored in the case of John Loeb Sr. By wedding the youngest daughter of the highly assimilated and accomplished Adele and Arthur Lehman, he secured the firmest foothold in the upper reaches of the German-Jewish elite in America. Nearly thirty years later, John and Frances Loeb's daughter, Ann, had the good sense and fortune of marrying Edgar Bronfman Sr., eldest son of Samuel Bronfman, founder and chief executive of Seagrams. John‘s father Carl, a man of considerable wealth himself, was overheard to say at his daughter's 1953 wedding, "Now I know what it feels like to be a poor relation."

Auspicious timing, as much as unerring matrimony, has served the Loebs magnificently well, contributing to the storied magic of their lives. When the pall of the Depression began to descend on America, Carl Loeb resigned as president of the American Metal Company, selling all his holdings at the hefty price of $85 a share. Three years later, in the depths of financial doldrums, the company was worth a dollar a share. Nine years later, Carl pulled it off again when he and his son John merged Carl M. Loeb and Co. with Rhoades and Co., a white shoe Wall Street firm that had fallen on hard times. As a result the Loebs gained direct access to the WASP milieu German Jews had envied and emulated for generations.

In the early sixties, the noted designer Sister Parish, the wife of Rhoades's senior partner, Harry Parish, suggested that John Loeb Sr. be invited to the Kennedy White House. Soon thereafter, he offered to underwrite the redecoration of the Oval Office, the room the First Lady regarded as the heart of the presidential residence.

The apple, it is said, does not fall far from the tree. In a further exquisite example of uncanny financial timing, John Sr., true to form, sold the firm's major Cuban sugar holdings practically a year to the day before Batista fled Havana and Castro came to power in 1959.

Indeed, the very first of John Loeb Sr.'s ancestors to have settled in America, Abraham Isaac, calculated wisely by leaving Emden, Germany, and arriving on these shores in the very last years of the seventeenth century. By 1729, he became a freeman who enjoyed civil liberty and by 1741 was happily naturalized.

Nearly sixty years later, John Loeb's maternal forebear, Isaiah Moses, emigrated from Bederkese, Germany, to Charleston, South Carolina. Seven years later he married Rebecca Phillips, a third generation American, whose father, Jacob, served in the South Carolina militia during the Revolutionary War. Isaiah went on to do so well as a Charleston dry-goods merchant that he bought the "Oaks," a 794-acre plantation built by the Middletons, one of the South's first families.

Christian society in the South proved more open to acculturated Jews than in the North. John Loeb's maternal grandfather, Alfred Huger Moses, graduated the College of Charleston, and then went west to study law in Montgomery. During the Civil War, he risked his own life for the South and though caught and court-martialed by Union soldiers was saved from the worst by an official pardon from President Andrew Johnson. In time, he built the largest real estate, banking, and brokerage business in Alabama. He also built the Moses Building in Montgomery, Alabama's first skyscraper.

A family tradition of leadership and excellence has been carried on by Alfred's great grandson John Loeb Jr. A major donor of the American Jewish Historical Society, a former American ambassador to Denmark, and current Chairman of the prestigious Winston Churchill Foundation, John Jr. is working tirelessly in providing a visitors' center for America's oldest existing Jewish house of worship, the Touro Synagogue of Newport, Rhode Island.

The parents of Frances "Peter" Loeb (1906-1996), Arthur and Adele Lewisohn Lehman, belonged to "Our Crowd"-- a term popularized by Stephen Birmingham's book of the same name which refers to the leading turn-of-the century German Jewish families of New York -- Lehmans, Lewisohns, Warburgs, Schiffs, Kuhns, Loebs, Seligmans Guggenheims, etc. -- who constituted America's Jewish elite. The Loeb archives, housed at the American Jewish Historical Society, contain a vast amount of materials, including correspondence with such distinguished figures as Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon and Ladybird Johnson, Abe Fortas, Paul Mellon, Abba Eban, and Teddy Kollek.

Peter's grandfathers, Mayer Lehman and Adolph Lewisohn, accumulated enormous wealth in their lifetimes. The son of a Bavarian cattle dealer, Lehman went from operating a cotton brokerage firm with his brothers Emmanuel and Henry (nee Chaim) in antebellum Alabama to building Lehman Brothers into one of Wall Street's most successful investment banking houses. Lewisohn came to America in 1867 representing his father's Hamburg-based bristle company. With his brother Leonard Adolph got in on the ground floor of a rapidly expanding copper industry. In 1898, operating jointly with Standard Oil, the Lewisohns controlled 55 percent of the copper output in the United States.

As the daughter of two of "Our Crowd's" most illustrious families, Peter inherited a wealth of information about her American roots stretching back deep into nineteenth- century New York:

PETER: My father told me that in his youth if you had "west" in your address it was considered acceptable, even chic, and if you had "east" it was not. He also told me that as a small boy he could walk up a few steps to Fifth Avenue and look up to the present site of the Frick Museum, which was then a farm with goats feeding on the grass.

New York in my parents' youth was a much smaller city than the New York I recall growing up in. In the 1880s and '90s the Bronx had not been developed and upper Manhattan was largely empty. Horse-drawn streetcars and carriages had not yet been replaced with electric- or gas-powered cars.

Daddy and his younger brothers, Irving and Herbert, were all born at the family home at 10 East 62nd Street. They all went to Dr. Sachs's School from the lower grades through high school. Daddy entered Harvard in 1890 and graduated a year ahead of his class. Before starting his career with Lehman Brothers, he spent a year with a cotton firm in New Orleans followed by a year and a half as an apprentice with a New York bank. Daddy was made a partner of Lehman Brothers in 1901, the year he married Mother, a student at Barnard, over the objections of Grandma Lewisohn who apparently felt she was more important than the Lehmans.

Grandma Lewisohn was a shadowy figure to me who died before I was ten. I knew my Grandmother Lehman much better. We lived at 31 West 56th Street and she lived in an apartment house on the corner of 58th Street and Seventh Avenue. My Uncle Sig and his wife lived in the same apartment house, as did their sons Alan and Harold and their families. Each of Grandma Lehman's children visited her every day, including Daddy who went straight from his office to tell her everything that had happened at Lehman Brothers that day.

Grandma Lehman was in her late seventies but dressed as if she were ninety, all in black. Her hair was thin and gray and wound up in the back. She wore a little purple pin similar to what you would use to attach an orchid to your shoulder. At the dining room table Grandma Lehman used the pin to attach a napkin to her blouse. She was quite short and not pretty but she had a sweet face. I was her favorite. She used to call me "Blackie" because I had very dark brown eyes.

After my parents returned from their honeymoon in 1901, they began building a house at 31 West 56th Street on a plot of ground given them by Grandpa Lewisohn. I came into this world on the third floor of that house on September 25, 1906, much to the consternation of Grandma Lehman as she waited most anxiously in the sitting room below for Mother to give birth to a son to bear the family name. When I was born all she said was, "Oh, isn't that too bad?"

When I was six months old I came down with a very high fever. There were no antibiotics or the like at the time. My parents feared it was all their fault because they had not loved me. Daddy would call Mother three times a day and ask, " How is our Peter Pan?" Maude Adams was playing in "Peter Pan" at the time and, as everyone knows, Peter Pan lives forever. That's how I came to be called Peter.

In 1926, a confident young Harvard graduate named John L. Loeb married Frances "Peter" Lehman, a daughter of one of America's leading families. Their wedding in Peter's grandfather Adolph Lewisohn's Fifth Avenue ballroom, was written up in Time on the same page as Rudolph Valentino‘s obituary. Beautiful, vivacious, refreshingly self-aware, Peter led a charmed life, which she recalled as an octogenarian in a remarkably self-assured oral memoir constituting but a small part of the American Jewish Historical Society's incredibly rich Loeb Archives. Here are a few excerpts.

PETER: Grandpa Lewisohn resided in an imposing house at 881 Fifth Avenue that he had purchased in 1908 from Mrs. E.H. Harriman for $800,000. The house had one of the largest private ballrooms in the city furnished with gold and white in one of the best examples of Louis XIV decoration in America. My sister Helen and I had a joint "coming out" party there in 1924.

A painting of a lion in a jungle, Le Repas du Lion, by Henri Rousseau, was the first work of art you saw as you walked into Grandpa's house. Not far away were Van Gogh's L'Arlesienne and Gauguin's Tahitian mother and child, La Orana Maria. Renoir's portrait of Madame Darras in a black dress hung over the mantel in the library near Manet's Boy with a Bubble.

Grandpa Lewisohn had many interests. He headed a commission for studying New York's prison problems that led in 1924 to the most progressive step in prison legislation ever taken in the state. He built the Lewisohn Stadium and financed the stadium's nightly concerts, which became legendary. As president of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, he championed the cottage system in orphanages.

Grandpa knew many important people. President and Mrs. Coolidge were his guests in Prospect Point in the Adirondacks. "Supper's served," Coolidge would complain to his wife, Grace, because of the late hour of lunch.

Grandpa traveled to his various homes like an Oriental potentate. He had his own private railway car and went everywhere with an entourage that included a personal secretary, a valet, a well known singing teacher, a major domo, and a barber who also played pinochle and golf with Grandpa. When his son Sam complained he was spending his capital, Grandpa responded, "Who earned it?"

Around 1920, Daddy began to look for property in Westchester. In 1923, he bought Ridgeleigh, a seventy-eight acres estate adjoining Whitelaw Reid's property. E.H. Harriman's first cousin Oliver and his family occupied Ridgeleigh before us. Legend had it that Mrs. Harriman's lover was Jay Gould and he really paid for it. The place could not have been more beautiful -- the terraces, the gardens, the greenhouses and all the wonderful plants Mother loved tending to.

Although my parents were hardly traditional -- I recall Crivelli's Madonna and Child on an easel in our home next to a tapestry of Mary, the Christ child, St. Anne and St. Joseph -- they did give me a sense early on of being Jewish, which is more than I can say for others. I had one friend whose name had been changed from Vogel to Vogelle. "You just say Vogelle," I remember saying to her, "to make it not sound so Jewish." And she said, "Why do you say that?" And I said, "Because I don't think you know you're Jewish." And she said, "I don't think I do." Not that I knew much more other than that we went to Temple Emanu-El once a year and that Father was a founder of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.

What kept us Jewish in those days was socializing entirely with other Jewish families. This is the way it was when my parents grew up and this is the way it was for me before I married John. I don't think there was one non-Jewish boy or girl at the dancing classes Mother organized at Grandpa Lewisohn's when I was eleven or twelve years old. Unquestionably, we were brought up in a Jewish society, even though we were so assimilated there wasn't much Jewish about us.

In my parents' home, in which we always had a relaxed atmosphere, one lowered one's voice when one used the word "Jewish." All sorts of terms were used instead. I cannot remember them all now, but I can remember once at the dinner table the name of the wife of a well-known personality came up and someone said in a whisper: "She is Jewish." And I said in a loud voice: "Why do you all lower your voices when you say ‘Jewish?' We are all Jews here." They looked at me as if I were crazy.

Contemporary American Jewish literature is a coat of many colors, woven of the rich fabric of generations of experience. At times it is a veritable crazy quilt of the factual and the fantastic, the somber and the surrealistic, fashioned in equal parts by the mythical, the magical and the imaginary.

"The Jewish Writer," a permanent exhibition housed at the Center for Jewish History, is a gallery of literary portraits shot by the distinguished photojournalist, Jill Krementz. Her camera eye has caught the lavishness of Jewish literary talent on the American scene today.

In 1944, the noted screenwriter Ben Hecht complained in "Guide to the Bedeviled" "the greatest single Jewish phenomenon…in the last twenty years has been the almost complete disappearance of the Jew from American fiction, stage, radio and movies." Assimilation, anti-Semitism, and acculturation conspired in creating a kind of cultural quietism and attenuation.

During the post-World War II era, the Jew in literature made a remarkable comeback, a latter-day secular resurrection. The American literary landscape was suddenly and audaciously alive with Jewish characters of every sort. Writers shed their coyness and let their Jewishness speak in loud, even stentorian, tones.

Krementz's roving lens captures the famed troika of post-war literature—the broadly humanistic and erudite Saul Bellow, the stylistically delicate and perfectly pitched Bernard Malamud and the mordantly satiric Philip Roth—collectively known as the "Hart, Schaffner and Marx" of the literary industry.

Her shutterbug catches Norman Mailer in an uncharacteristically tender moment, embracing his son, John Buffalo. Perhaps the most pugnacious of American Jewish writers, Mailer, a World War II combatant, seized the immediate postwar imagination with his classic "The Naked and the Dead" (1947), depicting the horror of battlefield carnage. A major writer of the post-Hemingway generation, Mailer successfully colonized such new literary territory as murder, sex, lust and power. Alfred Kazin, precocious heir to Van Wyck Brooks's deanship of American literary criticism, said Mailer was "a born novelist of society, so fascinated by its corruption and violence that he seems propelled to imitate its every appetite and to ride its roller coaster." Comparably, Joseph Heller, also a World War II veteran, a pilot who flew sixty bombing missions in Europe, brilliantly charted the illogic of war in his wildly successful and pathbreaking "Catch-22."

Krementz's democratic instrument is not fixed only on the highbrow. In full evidence are photographs of the commercially popular Chaim Potok, whose novels served as inspiration for generations of young Jews, the best-selling Belva Plain, "the queen of the family saga," and the religiously observant, yarmulke-clad Herman Wouk, whose page-turning tales often ended on the silver screen.

In Krementz's gallery, the thinkers are not banished to the margins, as is so often the case in American life. The post-war world saw the rise and primacy of the New York Intellectuals, a mid-century gaggle of brilliant literary journalists, critics and scholars who sought to marry modernism and social conscience in such famous journals as "Partisan Review," "Dissent" and the early "Commentary." A term coined by one its stellar members, the gifted critic and polemicist Irving Howe, the New York Intellectuals were plebian by birth but mandarin by taste and discernment. This brainy but contentious "family" consisted of the two Irvings—Howe and Kristol--Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Rahv among many others. Harold Rosenberg, the art critic and himself a charter member of the New York Intellectuals, pointedly described them as "a herd of independent minds."

Krementz's appreciative lens encompasses a new, post-acculturated generation of Jewish writers made possible in part by the impact of feminism, the Holocaust, the birth of Israel and a return to tradition. This so-called "open literary community" consists of the philosophically minded novelist Rebecca Goldstein, the wildly funny and poignant playwright Wendy Wasserstein, and the former poet laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky, among others. Many of the very youngest Jewish writers Krementz photographs live in easier proximity to religion and ritual than their forebears. Secularism, which once dominated the post-immigrant literary experience, now must share a far more crowded, diverse and jostling stage.

If there is one writer who hovers over Krementz's photographic processional, it surely must be the late American Yiddish fabulist, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Her 1978 shot of him as he leans over his battered manual typewriter fuses many of the themes of the Jewish writer in America—faith and doubt, the Old World and the New. He once wrote, "Life itself is a permanent crisis." Perhaps no better description of the literary vocation exists than that penned by this slightly stooped conjurer of dreams.

The literary canon today is far more porous than ever before. In the past, it often resembled a hermetically sealed casket, but in our more relaxed postmodern day the lid has loosened considerably.

Joseph Roth, the Jewish-born novelist and journalist who refracted twentieth century horrors through a largely nineteenth century style, is a leading beneficiary of the opening of literary rank. In recent years, he has joined Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil as part of the Austro-German literary pantheon of the first half of the twentieth century.

A tragedian of fate and a bundle of contradictions, Roth is at various times satiric and nostalgic, a practicing Jew and a convert to Catholicism. At long last he is a writer to contend with. One of the best ways to explore Roth the writer is to visit the Leo Baeck Institute where his literary estate—handwritten and typewritten manuscripts, correspondence, photographs et al.—is housed.

Born in Brody, Galicia, six miles from the Russian border, Roth was a product of the easternmost outpost of the Dual Monarchy, an identity that shadowed him to his dying day. A citizen of Paris, Vienna and Berlin, Europe's most sophisticated capitals during the interwar period, he never quite forgot his Eastern European origins nor lost his sympathy for the world's dispossessed.

In 1926 he wrote his classic and prescient "The Wandering Jews," now regarded as among the best books of its kind in German or indeed any language. In his travels through independent Poland and Soviet Russia, he rediscovered a world he had long parted from. At his best, Roth captured the poetry and pathos of the Jewish condition. He saw the Eastern Jews, in the words of his gifted English language translator, Michael Hoffmann, as "humans in their least packaged form…the most anomalous, individual of peoples."

Roth proved harsher on the assimilatory zeal of German Jews, who worshipped, in his informed opinion, the idol of patriotism. A latter-day Cassandra, Roth and his prophecies about the dangers of assimilation, materialism and German reaction went largely unheeded.

In the realm of fiction, Roth made his mark with his early lyrical novel "Job," a story set in a fictionalized Brody that won the plaudits of the critics and even became Marlene Dietrich's favorite novel. Translated into English, it was soon made into a Book-of-the-Month selection and turned into a Hollywood movie.

Roth's artistic voice is most perfectly realized in his masterpiece "The Radetzky March," a dirge to the Hapsburg monarchy, whose chief glory was its ceremonial court, its rich miscellany of cultures, and a life-enhancing heterogeneity that served as a temporary bulwark against a rising tide of totalitarianism. He borrowed the title of his book from the waltz king Johann Strauss' 1848 "Radetzky March," which Roth termed "the Marseillaise of conservatism."

A child of the century, Roth's early life was shadowed by tragedy. His father Nachum lived most of his life with wonder rabbis (miracle workers) in Poland and died in a Dutch lunatic asylum without ever having seen his son. In 1913 Roth arrived in Vienna, where he began writing professionally. A year later the world he knew and cherished was in flames. In 1916, at the age of eighteen, Roth joined the Austrian army and spent time in Russian captivity. He wrote later: "My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary."

Not surprisingly for one so prescient, Roth has Hitler appear by name in his very first novel, written in 1923, marking the first time the Austrian corporal is cited in a work of literature. In 1933, Roth left for Paris where he eked out a living writing novels and journalistic pieces as his drinking accelerated.

Not even Paris, the city he once celebrated as "free, open, intellectual …the capital of the world," could save him now. So much rode on an illusion--the dream of empire, the "Austrian idea," his incongruous royalist politics. Only the remembered past retained radiance and legitimacy; the present was squalid and second-hand.

He died in Paris in 1939, defeated, disabused, and largely forgotten. Ironically, an invitation from the American PEN Club, the organization that had brought Thomas Mann to America, was found among his personal effects. A professing Hapsburg monarchist, he was buried in the French capital according to the Catholic rite.

During the heyday of high modernism, Roth received short shrift. Among the cognoscenti, his non-experimental style, his "undamaged realism," was held against him. "He doesn't write like Joyce, so let him wait" was the prevailing sentiment.

The waiting game is now over. By the mid-fifties, a three-volume edition of his work came out which soon catapulted Roth in a league with Kafka and Mann. The man who viewed history as a nightmare and whose life closely resembled one has finally emerged into the light, to inhabit the bright palace of literary immortality.

The Hebrew Bible is the fountainhead of the Jewish people, the source book of its history, destiny and longing. Perhaps no other artist in the last century more fully comprehended its grief and grandeur than Ben-Zion, whose paintings and etchings of biblical figures and scenes convey the pith and grit of emotional conviction. His lifetime commitment to the immensity of Jewish experience, spanning from its earliest origins to contemporary times, is a testimonial to the indestructibility of a people and its artistic impulse.

The work of this singular artist is preserved with rare fidelity and discernment by his widow, Lillian Ben-Zion, a spry, articulate and devoted nonagenarian, in a narrow five-story brownstone situated within a four-block radius of the Center for Jewish History. The Ben–Zion House, which we had the pleasure of visiting recently, is not only a compendium of the artist's austerely visionary work, but also a repository of found objects, the infinitely varied collection of a man who his widow aptly calls "a beachcomber of the world around him." Scholars and lovers of Jewish history will find this perfectly preserved urban temple to art a living memorial to creativity.

Ben-Zion, a dramatic portraitist and memorialist of Eastern European Jewry, was born in the western Ukraine in 1897, into a world steeped in tradition and piety. His father, Hersh Weinman, a third-generation cantor, officiated in the largest synagogue in Galicia. At the age of seventeen, Ben-Zion, in an act of defiance, went to Vienna, took art lessons, but soon chose literature above art as his initial calling, writing Hebrew poems, fairy tales and dramas. But the juggernaut of history turned his hopes to ashes. After the conflagration of World War I and the death of his father, he and his mother emigrated to America in 1920.

Soon after his arrival Ben-Zion began to publish poetry in Hebrew. (Ben Zion's early and later works, many privately printed, are housed in the archives of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the American Jewish Historical Society.) In time, Ben Zion came to appreciate the essential hopelessness of his position as a Hebrew poet in America. With the rise of Hitler and the gathering storm engulfing European Jewry, he quickly grasped that art was the most immediate and vigorous medium to grapple with the unsayable.

By 1936 he had joined "The Ten," a group of expressionist painters, which included Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Joseph Solman, who opposed the academic provincialism of painting in New York. The group disbanded in the early forties, but by then Ben Zion had fully proceeded on his own inimitable path, in opposition to the then prevailing fashion of outright abstraction. His fellow painter Solman perhaps put it best, "He carved out in paint lumberingblack and white shapes as though the letters of the Hebrew alphabet had returned to imagery."

As European Jewry went up in flames, a world Ben-Zion knew intimately from boyhood, he poured out his rage and grief in a self-created style of stout black lines and heaped patriarchal faces in which form is reduced to its essentials. In "De Profundis," a group of fourteen gouaches and three oils, works created in response to the Holocaust, he depicts the harrowing of the Jewish people via his signature style.

Throughout these agonizing years, the Bible remained his touchstone. He wrote, "I know of no other book in which the apocalyptic and elementary conflicts, as well as the psychological complications of our time come to a stronger symbolic expression that in the Bible." Perhaps no biblical hero touched him with greater force than Moses, whom he portrayed in spiritual portraits capturing both the narrative sweep and religious power of the Pentateuch.

A lighter vein emerged in Ben Zion's sculptures, a more recent development of his artistry. In 1959, long after his reputation had solidified, he sought out old hand-wrought iron tools and implements and incorporated them into nimble sculptures, which evoked his sheer delight in the natural world. He thus became one of the few American artists who showed equal deftness in sculpture and painting, in each evincing a profound feeling for the object itself. Today, the Chelsea-based Ben-Zion House is graced by a sculpture garden filled with his primeval creations, each reflective of his inner feeling for nature.

In an increasingly dissolute and indulgent art world, where sacrilege and scatology are prized and feted (witness the likes of A. Serrano and the profanity of immersing sacred images in bodily excretions), how refreshing to rediscover Ben-Zion, an artist whose moral compass always pointed in the direction of verity and eternity. Never was this clearer than in his mature, dignified appreciation of the Bible, an artistic stance so vividly opposed to our culture's willful display of the scandalous, the sensationalistic and the sophomoric.

The Educational Alliance: Beacon Of Light For An Immigrant Community

Immigrant improvement, one of the great American stories, is a social saga of large ambition, breathtaking audacity and, alas, petty snobbery and condescension. It is history both raw and cooked, a roiling mix of human ingredients that makes for a compelling historical repast.

This was so in particular when the Lower East Side served as a place of refuge for countless Russian Jewish immigrants and their families fleeing tsarist pogroms. Into this milieu in 1889 a remarkable institution came into being -- the Educational Alliance, located at 197 East Broadway, New York City. Founded and funded by German Jews with the aim of Americanizing Yiddish-speaking Jews and their families, the Alliance ran morning classes for children, night classes for immigrants, classes in cooking and sewing, music and art, two summer camps, and much, much more.

The Educational Alliance took over the work of the Hebrew Free Schools Association but broadened it considerably. Under the leadership of Vilna-born David Blaustein, an educator and communal worker, it became the most important social-educational institution for the Americanization of immigrants. Indeed, during Blaustein's tenure, the standard of social work rose considerably as the long history of its professionalization began.

Few alumni associations in the nation can boast as stellar and far-reaching a constellation of graduates as that of the Educational Alliance. Its roster, reading like a "Who's Who of American culture," includes Felix Frankfurter, Morris Raphael Cohen, Sir Jacob Epstein, Ben Shahn, Eddie Cantor, David Sarnoff, Chaim Gross, Moses and Raphael Soyer, Geiorge and Ira Gershwin, and Zero Mostel.

The Educational Alliance archives at YIVO contain boxes upon boxes of pictures, studies, and reports, both printed and hand-written, in which uptown/downtown conflicts are often the order of the day. Take for example the following quote from an exasperated uptown counselor, which appeared in a 1902 summer camp report:

"It is a discouraging fact, but nonetheless true, that the East Side boy despises manual labor of whatever sort. He has not learned Emerson's "nobility of labor" nor Ruskin's "duty and love for work." Aside from intellectual exertion, all work seems menial to him. Boys had to be literally driven to make their beds, to sweep their rooms.

"The Lower East Side boy loathes vegetables largely because he does not know them as food. Lettuce is called "grass" and not eaten, cauliflower is meant for cattle, beans for people with nothing better to eat. Table manners, not to mention the usual conventions of decency and good breeding, are absent."

A far more sympathetic note is struck in the reminiscences of Sam Franko, a distinguished violinist in his day who gave freely of his time training an Alliance children's orchestra, which included young Jacob Gershowitz who later changed his name to George Gershwin:

"This class was composed of about thirty-five members, ranging from ten to fifteen years of age, and distinguished more by ambition than by talent. The parents, however, most of them immigrant Russian Jews, thought their offspring to be geniuses and became most indignant, almost insulting, when I was obliged to refuse to accept the one or the other. … The young students never missed an opportunity to accompany me to the subway station, each armed with a violin case. After class I often took the whole group into a restaurant and let them choose what they would from the menu, and I was often surprised by their modesty and good behavior."

Zero Mostel, who left an overcrowded apartment for art classes at the Alliance, "had never seen such big rooms before." Joseph Rolnick, a Yiddish poet who was also a garment worker, found the peace and quiet he needed in the Alliance's Aguilar library on a Sunday morning to finish a poem. Russian-born writer Maurice Hindus liked nothing better than taking an armful of books from the Aguilar library's bountiful shelves, sitting at a table and turning the pages. In a myriad of ways the Alliance was and is a trailblazing institution for generations of Americans in the making.

For well over a century, the Educational Alliance has proved to be an immigrant beacon: its far-darting beams of light have illuminated the path for countless new Americans. An equal opportunity provider, it has helped those yearning to be free to discover their way and to scale the social, linguistic and educational battlements of a new world.

Today, the Educational Alliance, headed by Robin Bernstein, has a new face that comports with the diverse demographic reality, the "gorgeous mosaic," of the Lower East Side. A 26-million dollar agency serving 40,000, only 7 percent of its budget comes from the UJA. In 2004, more than half of its funding is government derived, the remainder drawn from client fees, foundations and individual contributions.

The early 1950s marked a fundamental watershed in the history of the Educational Alliance. By mid-century, the descendants of the Eastern European Jews had entered the professional middle class and largely moved to financial success in the suburbs. A new wave of immigrants from the Far East, the West Indies and Latin America filled the old warrens and the new projects of the neighborhood. Their need for shelter, food, clothing and language instruction was no less pressing and peremptory than that of their predecessors. The Educational Mission was there to meet the new challenge.

Struggling immigrants from many of the world's continents today benefit from such vital services as the Educational Alliance's Head Start Program, which prepares young children for school; a co-op nursery; and citizenship classes and visual art instruction. As a New York State clinical mental health and substance abuse provider, the Educational Alliance runs two residences and an outpatient clinic on the Lower East Side, the latter offering a special drug prevention unit run by Russian-speaking social workers serving outer-borough immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

So successful has the Educational Alliance been in combating substance abuse that one of its recent assistant executive directors, an African-American man, first came to the agency as a heroin addict in search of treatment. He went on to obtain a bachelor's and master's degree with the help of the Alliance and soon began running the agency's drug treatment program which had benefited him so greatly. Eventually, his managerial acumen led him to further personal success, advancing to head a full-scale drug treatment program outside the agency. Indeed, mastery over adversity is an Educational Alliance byword. The New York Times Neediest Case articles, featuring immigrants who have broken out of the iron ring of poverty, are occasionally Educational Alliance success stories.

Robin Bernstein, head of the Educational Alliance, takes pride in the agency's after-school program, which serves all of the Lower Manhattan's seven public schools. Funneling $5.5 million worth of services for children and their families, the Educational Alliance is making a difference in the lives of the young New Yorkers.

Among the jewels in the agency's crown, its century-old Art School is perhaps the most brilliant. A great incubator of both talent and genius, it nurtured over the years a constellation of artistic stars, including such stellar names as Jacob Epstein, the Soyer brothers, and Zero Mostel among many others. Today, its Gifted Young Artists Program, which once sired the likes of Chaim Gross, numbers 250 students who receive instruction from professional artists. Its mission of lifting the spirits and enabling the talent of aspiring immigrants remains as inviolate and equitable today as a century ago.

New York's ever-shifting demographic and housing pressures are again remaking the face of the Lower East Side. Gentrification has brought back a sizable Jewish presence to the old neighborhood. Jewish singles and young families now find amid its once storied streets affordable housing. In today's increasingly harsh competitive real estate market, a three bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side goes for somewhat more than a half a million dollars—a relative steal in comparison to high maintenance brownstone Brooklyn and luxury appointed mid and upper Manhattan.

Today 15 to 20 percent of the Educational Alliance's clientele is once again Jewish. To be sure, the economic profile of these new Lower East Siders is appreciably different than their forebears, who crossed the ocean in steerage, faced the intractable fury of the elements and landed penniless on New York shores. Yet in human terms their needs are no less important. Once again, the Educational Alliance, operating in 25 locations and serving at once as a night school, day care center and atelier all rolled into one, has shown itself to be a thriving habitat for humanity. "The Alliance archives, housed at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and reaching back a hundred years and more, will help immeasurably in providing continuity for an indispensable institution."

The annals of American Jewry reflect and parallel those of the nation's historical beginnings. Indeed, no chronicle of the early settlement of this continent can be fully told without inclusion of the 23 Jews arriving in New Amsterdam 350 years ago this month in flight from religious oppression in Brazil. Nearly present at the creation, Jews continue to be an integral part of the great and enduring American experiment, one of the most successful articulations of human ambition and resolve.

Oscar Straus, the American Jewish Historical Society's first president and the first Jew to sit in a presidential cabinet, perhaps put it best nearly a century ago in a speech he gave in New York: "The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanization is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock."

One who knocked firmly and vigorously at the portals of New York was surely Moses Levy, a German born-Jew who arrived in the port of New York from London as a young man. (The portrait of him in the collection of the American Jewish Historical Society reproduced here is the earliest known likeness of a Jew in America.) By 1700 Levy was ensconced in Manhattan's Dock ward with his brother Samuel and their wives Rycha and Rachel (who were sisters) and their growing families.

No sooner had Moses Levy disembarked than he plunged into the incipient world of New York's emerging business class. Taking full advantage of commercial contacts based on family ties in London and the West Indies, he soon became so successful in the export-import trade that he named a ship after his favorite daughter Abigail and had it included in the portrait reproduced here. Business continued to boom, allowing Levy to contribute generously to the building of a steeple on Trinity Church at Broadway and Wall, making it the tallest man-made structure in New York for some years.

Moses Levy's personal stature, civic attainments and early Americanization are best captured in the portraits (all in the collection of the American Jewish Historical Society) not only of himself but also of his daughters Rachel and Abigail, his son-in-law Jacob Franks, and his grandchildren David and Phila Franks. It is by far the most complete visual record we have of an early colonial American Jewish family. Decked out in an imposing powdered wig and a greyhound at his side symbolizing his landowning status (unattainable for a Jew elsewhere in the Christian world) Levy radiates the well-fed comfort and well-bred confidence of a successful merchant-landowner.

Even though Levy numbered among the earliest presidents of New York's Spanish and Portuguese congregation Shearith Israel (until the 1730s the only permanent Jewish congregation in North America) there is no sign of religious affiliation in the portrait of Levy. None of the accoutrements of Judaism are in evidence -- no peyes (side locks), no kapota (outer garment associated particularly with Polish Jews), no yarmulke, no mezuzah affixed to the doorpost, not a prayer book or star of David in sight, nothing of what Moses Levy's forebears had known so well and cultivated so assiduously in the old country. Instead, he looks irreproachably like an English colonial gentleman, indistinguishable from his gentile counterparts. His well-fitting frock, his fixed gaze, his elaborate hairstyle, his very pose and expression -- from head to toe he is the very picture of success and conformity.

So remarkable a makeover is ample testimony of how far Levy had come in so short a time. His family, marching in stride, would achieve comparable heights. His son, Nathan, one of the first Jews to settle in Philadelphia in 1740, transported the Liberty Bell from England on his ship the Myrtilla. His daughter Rachel, though an Ashkenazi, married Isaac Mendes Seixas, a Sephardi, something almost unheard of in wealthy western Sephardi circles. His oldest daughter Abigail, like the ship named in her honor, proved to be a sturdy and faithful vessel of tradition and adaptation, navigating the changing currents and swift tides of early New York society.

Abigail possessed a mother lode of native wit and talent that would mark her priceless collection of letters written to her oldest son living in London and dating back to the 1730s, now a prized possession of the American Jewish Historical Society. Abigail Levy Franks, one of the earliest epistolary masters of American Jewry, is a vivid example of the convergent destinies of Jews and America.

Letters, at their best, are at once keepsakes of the heart and chronicles of their time. Abigail Levy Franks (1696-1756), a born letter writer, offers us a window into her mind, as well as an exemplary portrait of Jewish family life in early America. Her many letters to her son Naphtali, dating back to the 1730s, are now housed in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society.

In 1712, Abigail Levy, the daughter of Moses Levy (1665-1728), a successful New York merchant, married Jacob Franks (1687-1769), the son of a London "Jew Broker" who came to New York with his own shadchen (matchmaker) and rose to become a major supplier of food, clothing and ammunition to Britain's colonial forces.

They sired nine children. The eldest son, Naphtali, emigrated to London to represent the family business while his mother remained in New York. Abigail's letters to Naphtali (edited by Isidore Mayer and Leo Hershkowitz and published by American Jewish Historical Society) capture so well the world of a colonial Jewish matriarch.

Take, for example, the way Abigail hovers over her son, as in 1737 when she writes: "I have sent you two kegs of pickles. One is a fifteen-gallon filled with pepper and the other ten with mangoes, peaches and a few peppers to fill up the cask. When you receive them, take the peaches and mangoes and put fresh vinegar to them and that will take the strength of the pepper."

Abigail put her children's education high on her list of priorities. Wanting to give them a Jewish and a secular education, Abigail sent her children both to Mr. Lopez, a melamed from Amsterdam employed by New York's fledgling congregation to educate its children, and to Mr. Malcolm, a Protestant minister and educator. The girls were also sent to Mrs. Brownell's, a young lady‘s finishing school. Here is Abigail proudly monitoring her children's educational progress in a letter dated October 7, 1733:

"Moses is learning mathematics at Mr. Malcolm's, who tells me he will go through it with an abundance of ease and be perfect in a very little time. Phila learns French, Spanish, Hebrew and writing in the morning, and in the afternoon goes to Mrs. Brownell's. She makes a quick advancement in whatever she learns. Mr. Lopez tells me he is surprised at her advancement in Spanish."

No less than three languages would do -- French for culture; Hebrew and Spanish: the languages Mr. Lopez was employed to teach. His surprise at Phila's progress in Spanish reflects her prior ignorance, as an Ashkenazi, of the Hidalgo mother tongue of the little Riveras, De Lucenas and Gomezes sitting next to her.

Finding a good match was no easy matter for Abigail. Because New York's Sephardic elite looked to the Caribbean for Sephardi brides, Abigail's daughters were left with slim pickings. "There is David Gomez who for some years had had an inclination for Richa," Abigail notes in a letter to Naphtali dated December 5, 1742 "but he is such a stupid wretch that if his fortune were much more and I were a beggar no child of mine, especially one of such good understanding as Richa, should ever have my consent, and I am sure he will never get hers."

He never did. On June 7, 1743, Abigail informs Naphtali that Phila has run off with the son of a prominent Episcopalian family: "I am now retired from town and would from myself if it were possible to have some peace of mind from the severe affliction I am under on the conduct of that unhappy girl Phila…I heard the report of her going to be married to Oliver Delancey but as such reports had often been of either of your sisters I paid no further heed to it than a general caution of her conduct which has always been unblemished and is so still among the Christians who allow she had disobliged us but has in no way been dishonorable, being married to a man of worth and character."

In the end, a price, and a very steep one, had to be paid for such hasty elopements, however socially advantageous. While Naphtali and his brother Moses, who joined him in London, did marry their English first cousins, their own grandchildren left the Jewish fold. Indeed, of Abigail's more than two-dozen grandchildren none passed on their religious heritage to subsequent generations. The delicate balance between tradition and assimilation proved a far trickier feat to negotiate than Abigail Levy Franks ever imagined in her well-turned letters leading up to the first known case of an American daughter of Israel marrying out of the faith.

New York has remained for generations a lodestar of immigration. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Lower East Side was crowded beyond compare, bursting with newly arrived Jews from the Czarist Empire. By 1900 more Jews lived on the Lower East Side than on the most crowded streets of Bombay or Calcutta. Fears grew among uptown co-religionists, the custodians of communal welfare, that Jewish population density had not only exceeded the port city's absorptive capacity but also the coffers of Jewish charities, which were almost empty.

In response, America's Jewish leadership, then comprised mainly of German-born Jews, sought to deal with what it deemed a demographic tinderbox. It crafted a kind of social engineering scheme called the Industrial Removal Office (IRO), a name with unfortunate Holocaust associations. Founded in 1901 and financially supported by the Baron de Hirsch Fund with the collaboration of the B'nai B'rith, the IRO urged Russian-born Jews to leave congested port cities on the eastern seaboard such as Boston, Philadelphia and especially New York for smaller communities out west. The records of the IRO housed at the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) tell a fascinating story of good intentions often gone awry.

Socially hygienic in nature and goal, the IRO attempted to abolish filth and disease and to solve the soaring delinquency and crime rate of the Lower East Side and other immigrant enclaves. Its largely unstated goal was to retard the further development of radical movements such as socialism and anarchism that urban concentration bred among Eastern European Jews and in so doing avert feared outbreaks of anti-Semitic reaction.

In its 21 years of existence, the IRO distributed some 75,000 Jews to over 1,500 cities and towns across America. These twice-displaced immigrants were not, on the whole, a reticent bunch and spoke their mind by writing, often and at length, to IRO's main office on Second Avenue, a major Lower East Side thoroughfare.

Their letters were at times positive--even striking jubilant notes. One grateful removal to Wichita, Kansas, wrote, "I thank you for myself and my family from the bottom of our hearts. You are the real doctors, bringing people back to life again." But more often less sanguine voices were heard. One unfortunate protested vociferously, "by sending me to Seattle, you have really killed me, as I am out of work, destitute, lonely, naked and in a position of starvation." An unhappy Mary Rubin wrote from New Orleans, "You have sent us here to starve from hunger and live in the streets." Some even compared harsh conditions in America to their recent experience of Siberian rigor and toil.

The IRO office was bombarded by, as well, the recriminations of put-upon host communities. A Lafayette, Indiana businessman named Sam Rostoff wrote indignantly: "Let me tell you that all the people sent here, from the first to the last, were a burden to the community. To inform you of all the scandals that took place on account of the people you send here would be enough to fill a book."

Southern Jews, in particular, were outraged at being singled out. Reacting with a kind of geographic "NIMBY" (not in my backyard) response, they argued vehemently that neither their neither the hot weather of the South nor the social and economic climate would suit Eastern European Jews.

David Bressler, the German-born American Jew, a graduate of City College, the Jewish Theological Seminary and New York Law School who headed the IRO from 1903 to 1916, was most often the recipient of such flack, which he managed to take in stride. Efficient, cool-headed and meticulous, he ran a professional operation, keeping detailed statistics and extensive files, publishing annual reports, training competent office workers and supervising New York staff and field operatives. That the American Jewish Historical Society has preserved these records has proven of invaluable importance to Jewish historians past and present.

For most Eastern European Jews landing on American shores the very thought of resettlement and the trauma of a second uprooting were simply inconceivable. Far better to suffer the pains and indignities of urban squalor and congestion than to risk life and limb in what was regarded by most recently arrived east European Jewish immigrants as a largely undiscovered and untamed continent. In real terms, the IRO, however well meaning, proved a diversion. A mere 5 percent of Jewish immigrants pouring into this country were convinced to relocate to the heartland. In the end, New York proved the asylum and anchorage of choice.

Genealogy, the search for roots, is history at its most personal. On the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the first arrival of Jews in North America, the quest for origins has turned from private initiative to public endeavor as the American Jewish community collectively celebrates its centuries old heritage.

Few people can claim as varied, intricate and wide-ranging a family tree as Ruth Hendricks Schulson, a tenth-generation Jewish American. Among the family's archival treasures is America's oldest Jewish bible brought to New York c. 1700 by Louis Moses Gomez, a direct ancestor of both Ruth‘s mother Rosalie Gomez Nathan (1894-1986) and Ruth's father Henry Solomon Hendricks (1892-1959). The American Sephardi Federation's current exhibition “Pernambuco, Brazil: Gateway to New York” includes some of the family's most prized heirlooms.

Ruth is a descendent of Louis Moses Gomez's son Mordecai and his wife Rebecca De Lucena who traces her American ancestry to 1655, the year after the arrival of the first twenty-three settlers from Brazil. Four separate bloodlines going back three centuries and more connect Ruth to practically every 18th century Jew in America.

Ruth's father was a World War I naval officer and a distinguished attorney who served as president of Shearith Israel (as did Louis Moses Gomez), the Jewish Family Service and the Jewish Welfare Board. He was also treasurer of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) and chairman of the board of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

On her mother's side Ruth descends from Revolutionary War veteran Simon Nathan and, closer to our own time, to her Uncle Edgar, one of Manhattan's first Jewish borough presidents. On her father's side, Ruth traces her ancestry back to pioneers in the copper industry vital to the growth of the American economy and the nation's military might. Hendricks customers included Paul Revere who, it is said, crafted the chiming steeple bells in nineteenth century Boston and New York with Hendricks copper.

The copper enterprise's founder Harmon Hendricks (1771-1838) was also a patriot. A graduate of Columbia College, president of Shearith Israel, and a generous philanthropist, Hendricks provided the U.S. with supplies from his copper rolling mill, which proved crucial to America's naval victories in the War of 1812. A hundred years earlier Harmon's great grandfather Louis Moses Gomez built a trading outpost in upstate New York which today is America's oldest Jewish homestead.

Harmon Hendricks's loyalty to America was matched only by his devotion to family and tradition. Many of his children became pillars of New York's Jewish community, including Henry Hendricks, a founder of New York's Jews' Hospital, now Mount Sinai, the oldest Jewish-affiliated medical institution in the United States.

Ruth was married in 1950 to Hyman Schulson, an attorney, an eighth generation Jerusalemite and an Ashkenazi. Fluent in English, Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic, Hy, a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School, was an avid Zionist while Ruth worked tirelessly as president of Shearith Israel‘s sisterhood. Judaism does not stop with Ruth and Hy. Their traditions are being carried on by all of their seven grandchildren.

Ruth Hendricks Schulson's family saga covers the arc of the American Jewish experience. It is the story of how a group of Jews stretching back to colonial days did well and good in America while preserving the Jewish way of life. At once a personal chronicle and a public tale, Ruth's history demonstrates how and why the Jewish family continues to remain down to our own day the true country of the heart.

Clothing, always a barometer of self and society is the most outward signature of identity. On first glance, we are what we wear.

The history and self-definition of American Jewry is inseparable from the chronicle of America's clothing industry. Indeed, immigrant Jews found an ideal way of fitting into a new culture by outfitting the nation's fast-growing and industrializing population.

Yeshiva University Museum's November 2005 exhibition, "A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry" will be among its most ambitious in scope and reach. A recipient of a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the exhibition will explore a century of Jewish involvement in one of America's defining industries and its powerful influence on finance, fashion and fantasy.

Yeshiva University Museum's forthcoming exhibition at its home at the Center for Jewish History has been designated as an NEH 'We the People' initiative which, according to Sylvia Herskowitz, director of YUM, "promotes distinctive projects that explore significant events and themes in the nation's history and culture and that advance knowledge of the principles that define America."

Jews were present at the creation of what has become the American vernacular style of dress. The best known is Levi Strauss, a young Bavarian-born Jewish immigrant orphaned in childhood, who invented the rugged-looking Levi jeans. Once a utilitarian rural outfit, it is today an indispensable symbol of urbane sleekness and sartorial sophistication.

As a penniless teenager, Levi Strauss was brought to America in the mid-1840s by his two older brothers and put to work pack peddling in upstate New York. Desperate to alter his fortune, Levi traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, where, peddling with a horse and wagon, he made enough money to gamble it all on a boat ticket to California.

Expenses were high -- one hundred dollars for a business license and at least as much a month for rent and food. Only for those who knew how to buy cheap and sell fast was there a future there. Strauss proceeded to peddle goods from trunks on the back of a hired wagon to nearby gold mining camps with such strange-sounding names as Fiddletown, Michigan Bluff, Murphy's and Chinese Camp.

In one of these towns, with his last bolt of tenting canvas, Levi had a local tailor fashion the durable cloth into a dozen pair of trousers. The pants, which came to be known as "Levi's", were a hit and soon the orders were pouring in. Others went under, but not Strauss. Benefiting from opportunities for expansion created by the Civil War, Strauss soon headed a thriving three-million dollar a year dry goods and clothing business in San Francisco, the ultimate western boom town, producing rugged pants, overalls and jackets of blue denim cloth with copper-riveted pockets for questing gold miners and, eventually, the American worker nationwide.

"A Perfect Fit" will trace America's odyssey from such early fashion trailblazers as Ida Rosenthal, inventor and manufacturer of the Maiden Form Bra, and Nettie Rosenstein, inventor of "the little black dress," to latter-day icons Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Donna Karan. Here is a story at once American and Jewish, a social symbiosis and cultural weave that cuts to the heart of the nation's look and aspiration.

For Jews, the clothing trade has often served as a road map to economic riches, social mobility and the American dream. Stitch by stitch, American Jewish garment manufacturers joined by legions of hard-pressed immigrant workers wove their way into the very texture of American history.

Yeshiva University Museum's November 2005 exhibition, "A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry," curated by Gabriel Goldstein, will trace the dynamic convergence of an ancient people's pressing needs and a great industrial nation's economic imperatives. This groundbreaking project, nearly a decade in the making, will profit as much from the archival holdings of YIVO, the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), and the Leo Baeck Institute as from the munificence of the National Endowment of Humanities.

Yeshiva University Museum's story, paralleling the saga of American Jewry, is a tale of rags to riches, of poor immigrant men and women and their offspring pulling themselves up for generations by sometimes almost single-handedly outfitting a nation with decent clothing.

Even before his bar mitzvah, Louis Borgenicht (1861-1942) had already earned a few pennies delivering mail in the Hungarian shtetl he grew up in. As an apprentice a few years later in a dry goods store, Louis learned, among other things, how to bait a customer with a shawl before substituting a cheaper one from under the counter. Ever restless, Louis moved on to the city of Jaslow where he immersed himself in the clothing industry. "Days and nights," he recalled in his memoir housed at AJHS, " I pored over goods."

In an economy with no manufacturing to speak of and no demand for anything, Louis dreamed of a better life. Finally, in 1888, he and his wife sailed for America. Starting out in an eight-dollar-a-week apartment on Eldridge Street, Louis began by selling herrings. Soon he was buying and selling whatever he could lay his hands on.

One day, Louis noticed a little Slavic girl wearing an apron utterly common in central Europe but still unknown in America. This prompted him to buy 150 yards of material on Hester Street. With the help of his wife, he manufactured forty childrens' aprons in one day. Investing his profit in gingham and white goods, Louis and his wife opened a children's clothing store on Sheriff Street and lived in its back rooms. As soon as they could afford to, a few girls were hired to work on machines manufacturing childrens' dresses.

But Louis was far from satisfied. "I wanted to grow," he recalled, "to employ crowds of people, and here I was dealing with customers who wanted one dress or two petticoats. At night I lay awake and thought of my frustration." Longing to break into "the real downtown merchants' district," Borgenicht moved nearer to Broadway where, by cutting expenses he competed successfully with uptown German Jews. Following the example of other Yiddish-speaking "Division Street moths," Louis acted as his own subcontractor, did his own cutting, and hired girls fresh off the boat at low wages.

Borgenicht expanded rapidly. By 1910 he was the "king of the children's dress trade" with a work force of 150 and a sales staff of fourteen receiving orders from the country's largest stores. By 1913, Louis divided his life between his offices on Broadway, an opulent West Side residence, and a summer home in the Catskills replete with stables, gardens, orchards, a tennis court, and a swimming pool. "Starting from scratch in a strange land," Louis recalled, "I had established a new line which in 20 years developed into a significant industry. The concept was overwhelming to a man who had come to the U.S. with bare hands."

The art of clothing, much like drama itself, is a dance of opposites. Men and women, form and fabric, craftsmanship and mass production, labor and management-all of life's basic elements and clashing contradictions are invested therein.

Yeshiva University Museum's forthcoming November 2005 exhibit, "A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry" will give us both sides of the equation. Comprehensive in sweep, it will offer us the full range of an industry--its designers, manufacturers and laborers, which fashioned the look of the nation and the profile of generations of Jews. On the distaff side, we have two exemplary women, Rose Schneiderman and Nettie Rosenstein, who encompass the tale of how Jews appareled America. Theirs is a story in contrast, pitched in the highest key.

Born in Chelm, Poland in 1882, Rose grew up in a Lower East Side sweatshop. For ten hours a day, six days a week she stitched in cap linings. "By working hard," Rose recalled, "I could make an average of about $5 a week... After I had been working as a cap maker for three years it began to dawn on me that we girls needed an organization."

While still in her teens, Rose joined the labor movement. During her long tenure as vice president and then president of the Women's Trade Union League, Rose organized many of the lowest paid and most severely exploited workers in New York City and also trained a new generation of working-class organizers.

Rose spent much of her early career organizing unions for immigrant women working in the garment, paper box, glove, hat, and artificial flower trades. A five-foot firebrand, Rose spoke from the heart. At a memorial service for the victims of the Triangle Shirt Fire, she had this to say:

"The old Inquisition had its instruments of torture. We know what these things are today. The iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews the machinery, the rack the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch fire. This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred." Rose went on to become one of New York's first female secretaries of labor.

On the opposite side of the ledger stands Nettie Rosenstein, the inventor of the "little black dress," the woman Life magazine profiled in 1937 as one of the most revered of American designers. Born Nettie Rosenscrans in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she and her family settled in Harlem in the 1890's.

The young Nettie was a quick study and by the age of eleven, she began sewing her own clothes. In 1916 she married Saul Rosenstein and soon was stitching informally for friends, opening a dressmaking business in her house. By 1921 she had moved to midtown Manhattan where she employed a staff of fifty. Nettie switched to wholesaling after I. Magnin approached her. Although her clothes were soon sold around the country, only one store in each city was permitted to use her label.

Nettie's "little black dress" evolved from her early 1940's creations in black crepe and other supple materials that were designed for daytime use, but by dint of bare necklines, could be worn in the evenings. Her well-made suits, printed dresses with matching gloves, and costume jewelry also became the fashionable rage along with Nettie's ravishing Odalisque Perfume which gave Paris a run for its money.