Family of Strangers: Building a Jewish Community in Washington State, and: Jews in Michigan (review)

It is to be expected that community histories will offer celebratory narratives that revolve around the achievements and contributions of regional figures and institutions. Even such congratulatory accounts can serve as useful texts for academic historians by providing clear narratives of institutional growth and guides to community leaders, trends, and issues. Particularly useful are community histories that bring the resources of local historical collections to a broad audience. Family of Strangers performs this service admirably, by building its narrative around the excellent collection of the Washington State Jewish Historical Society, including its extensive oral history archive. In contrast, Jews in Michigan suffers from a lack of primary source documentation, and is further flawed by excising controversy from the record.

Molly Cone, Howard Droker, and Jacqueline Williams's account of the history of Jews in Washington benefits from the extensive collection of oral histories, institutional records, and private papers housed in the University of Washington Libraries. Written at the request of the Washington State Jewish Historical Society and by members of the Seattle Jewish community, it is not surprising that this community portrait is a flattering one. Throughout the text Jews are celebrated as successful businessmen, visionary leaders, creative artists, and thoughtful contributors to life in Washington state. Yet along with this congratulatory tone, Family of Strangers presents material for addressing more serious questions about the development of the Jewish community in Washington. Thus, while discussions of the four waves of immigrants (Central Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Sephardim, and refugees from Nazism) offer the expected profiles of successful immigrant merchants, professionals, philanthropists, and civic leaders, the authors also provide evidence of chain migrations that help to explain why these four waves arrived on Washington's shores. Likewise, in documenting the stories of individual immigrants, the authors suggest patterns in settlement and interaction among communities in Washington and between Washington and the other western states that peak the interest of the academic historian. Their discussion of Central Europeans, Eastern Europeans and Sephardim goes beyond documenting the degree of cooperation and conflict to suggest that the presence of the largest group of Sephardim outside of New York City made Seattle's Jewish community exceptionally diverse. Indeed, this diversity is what makes Washington's Jewish community the "family of strangers" referred to in the title.

Family of Strangers' use of thematic chapters, which are often further subdivided into sections focusing on specific cities, is sometimes awkward. For example, the chapters on organizations and on synagogues would flow better if similar institutions were discussed together, rather than separately, city by city. The city-by-city organization is particularly problematic in a state in which the Jewish community is so heavily concentrated in one city. A lengthy section on Seattle is often followed by a series of shorter and much more generalized discussions of smaller cities. Despite such flaws, even these chapters do succeed in providing rich description based on primary source material, and go beyond simply documenting the chronological development of synagogues and other institutions to raise questions about how institutional development in Washington compares to other American Jewish communities.

While the authors of Family of Strangers do not answer all of the questions they raise, they provide scholars with a taste of the rich archival evidence that can serve as a basis for future analysis. Drawing extensively on the Washington State Jewish Historical Society archive, Cone, Droker, and Williams feature many individual stories, and often use the voices of community members to present descriptions of community events, institutions, and social relations. These voices give vibrancy to their descriptions of community and institutional life that is lacking in Judith Levin Cantor's Jews in Michigan.

Opening with a discussion of the high level of Civil War military service among Michigan Jews, Cantor's history focuses heavily...