When Heredity Met the Bacterium: Quarantines in New York and Danzig, 1898-1921

[Excerpt] Recent careful examinations of American quarantines placed on incoming migrants have found that health officials were potent carries of bigotries rooted in the larger society; but usually historians have not paid sufficient attention to the complex challenges facing quarantine units in action. By examining the work of quarantine health officials dealing with migrating Jews from East Central Europe this analytical narrative seeks to show in detail important structural circumstances within which acts of bigotry manifested themselves between the 1890s and 1920s. The narrative also has a larger agenda. Connections between public health quarantines and bio-cultural determinisms have long participated in the construction of public enemies. For instance in the 1980s, during the early years of the AIDS panic in the United States, public health officials could take for granted a citizenry that had long trusted in abstract empirical scientific knowledge and, for half a century, in the disease curing power of pharmacology\u27s sulfa drugs and other antibiotics. Even so, in the first moments of panic all sorts of calls for screens and quarantine impacted on public policy discussions in ways reminiscent of the years between the 1890s and 1920s. During those years biological determinisms from the past had remained in the saddle. Even as modern public health programmes were becoming dramatically successful in fighting disease, they remained affected by hierarchies of bio-cultural notions, especially in apprehensions about immigrants as agents of dangerous contagious diseases. That is one reason why this article focuses on Jews. The other reason derives from the evidence about Jews and disease in the places and times covered by this study. To be sure, there were other quarantines, involving, for example, resident Chinese and Italians; and in the months after the First World War potential incomers from Italy were at least as much an object of concern among American advocates of immigration restriction as were the Jews in Poland. But, in part, because of a typhus epidemic in that war-torn country, the association between disease and bio-cultural assumptions about Jews retained its traditional particularity in Western Europe and in the United States

Jews as a Changing People of the Talmud: An American Exploration

[Excerpt] My project has two parts. The first part demonstrates that Jews were in fact a changing people of the Talmud. Even though I make some references to it, discussion of that large subject awaits further investigation. The second part of the project is to identify and evaluate reputations of Jews as a People of the Talmud. An aspect of that work is the primary concern of this article

Americanization at the Factory Gate

[Excerpt] In the decade of World War I the militant wing of the Americanization movement tried to impose its solutions for national vigor and harmony upon welfare and safety programs designed to make industrial relations less exploitive and wasteful. Convinced that the teaching of English and civics was essential for the nation\u27s welfare, militant Americanizers used the war in Europe to launch a campaign for disciplining the loyalties and languages of America\u27s immigrant. This crusade brought them to factories employing large numbers of newcomers. They tried to make existing welfare and safety programs instruments of their crusade and sought to institute practices designed to make immigrant workers learn English and civics. Though they failed to make welfare and safety programs an integral part of the Americanization movement, militant Americanizers helped shape the educational programs large employers of labor were developing for their workers

Survivors’ Talmud and the U.S. Army

[Excerpt] In many a library stands a set of oversized volumes which appear to be ordinary copes of the Babylonian Talmud but constitute in fact an extraordinary edition. On page one of each volume are sketches of camps and barbed wire, of palm trees from the Holy Land. The title page explains. At its head stands a tribute in the English language. The set is the Survivors’ Talmud dedicated to the United States Army of Occupation in Germany

TRANSPORTZYKLONBKREMATORIA

[Excerpt] Recently a number of books and articles have appeared which should persuade historians to reconsider some of America\u27s activities during World War II. One work, British Intelligence in the Second World War (1981), now in its second volume, reveals how much more British Intelligence knew about German affairs than many officials at the time acknowledged and than historians had imagined. Other studies, based on state and private archives in England, France, Germany, Israel, and the United States, have presented new details and insights to officialdoms in Western democracies, ranging from those in military command to bureaucrats in Vichy, France to public servants in Palestine. Two books written for the general public as much as for the profession, Martin Gilbert\u27s Auschwitz and the Allies and Lucy S. Dawidowicz\u27s The Holocaust and the Historians, provoke important questions about the behavior of Americans when they encountered Germany\u27s Final Solution, during the war and in the historical records afterwards

New Jewish Politics for an American Labor Leader: Sidney Hillman, 1942-1946

[Excerpt] This paper argues that in the Holocaust years the public Hillman, the labor leader, trapped in the tribal fires of his own modernity, stopped acting as a “deracinated citizen.” Between 1942 and 1946, he used his prestige and influence to facilitate the Zionist cause, without having it interfere with his other efforts on behalf of an anticolonial new world order lead by an American-Soviet alliance

Ethnic Democracy and Its Ambiguities: The Case of the Needle Trade Unions

[Excerpt] During the years between World War I and World War II the conduct among well-known Jewish labor leaders seems to have foreshadowed events in the history of America’s nationality following the tumult of the 1960’s. In the 1920’s and 1930’s America’s elected or appointed officials still used a pecking order based on assumed inequalities of race, ethnicity, and gender in making policy decisions. They presumed that their private interests, those of the “insiders,” the “leading groups,” or “controlling minorities,” were the only appropriate ones for determining public policy. It was then, especially in the Depression years, when the New Deal Democrats competed successful with fascists, socialists and Communists, that “ethnic democracy” in the world of organized workers began to emerge as part of a complex process. In time it would alter meanings of “private” and “public” among group relations in the changing history of America’s nationality

The Holocaust in American Historical Writing

[Excerpt] Within ten years after the public discussion of the destruction of European Jewry began in the United States, the Holocaust became a complex problem of contemporary history. So many dogmatic judgments were being made about the people in the disaster that Clio’s most devoted disciples were bound to find it difficult to retain their position of detached fair-mindedness. Yet, where historians working in the United States would place the Holocaust in their writings was not quite clear

Silence in America Textbooks

[Excerpt] Although more than two decades separate us from the time when the Allied forces revealed the depth and dimensions of the Nazi horror, America’s textbook-writing historians still do not understand the demands the death camps place on each of them as scholar and as educator of the young in our public schools and universities. They continue to write in the tradition that prepared no one for the catastrophe, a tradition that still prevents us from attempting to assess and understand what happened; for with precious few exceptions they write of the years before 1945 as if the 1930’s and 1940’s did not require a re-examination of European history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Political Loyalties, Immigrant Traditions, and Reform: The Wisconsin German-American Press and Progressivism, 1909-1912

Progressive leaders held that German-Americans supported them in their bid for national power. This author takes a look at the other side, at the terms of the German-Americans themselves, and finds – quite another story