From Community and Place to Network and Space: The Transnational Dimension of Immigration in American Jewish History

The concept of “transnational history” emerged in the 1990s as a response to the call to “internationalize” American history.¹ It is no accident that this new methodological approach among American historians had an extraordinary impact on Jewish history, a field of research that was at the same time particularly influenced by a re-emerging transnational consciousness in a newly united post-Cold War Europe.

Transnational approaches have challenged previous understandings of “Americanization” and “assimilation” as linear, straightforward and one-directional processes. Today immigrant identities are generally understood by scholars to result from “complex and multidirectional processes of transformation and cultural hybridization.”² Transnational history examines how such complex identities are influenced by such factors as the political or legal status of immigrants, including statelessness, naturalization, multiple citizenships, and loyalties as new citizens. Transnational history is therefore a promising analytic category for understanding American Jewish history, which is intensely connected with histories of Jewish and non-Jewish communities abroad. A transnational perspective also allows us to judge if and to what degree American Jewry is unique, special or connected with other Jewries. In the form of comparative history it further helps us explore the commonalities and differences of diverse Jewries.³

In the following, I want to highlight where a transnational perspective has generated new insights on movement, political activism, and cultural exchanges between Central Europe and the United States.

My first project explored the Nazi penetration of the German speaking community in the United States. Although this work did not primarily focus on Jewish history, Jews, antisemitism, and the systematic exclusion of Jews from the German-American community were an essential part of my interest.⁴

Nazi activities had a noticeable impact on American domestic and foreign policy and on American ethnic relations and cannot be understood solely as an American phenomenon.⁵ Only a transnational approach reveals the agency of a network of state and non-state actors in the mobilization of ethnic Germans in the United States by Nazism. Such an approach shows that their political mobilization developed gradually and went hand in hand with the establishment of total political control in Germany.

A transnational perspective helps us understand how Nazi ideology affected the German-speaking ethnic group in the United States. The adoption of Nazi definitions of Germanness by parts of the organized German-American community, especially by those who depended on the contact with “the official Germany,” led to the formal exclusion of German Jews from the German-American associational life in the United States after 1933.⁶ A transnational view thus shows generally how racist definitions of national or ethnic identity may reach beyond state borders as “long distance nationalism.” It informs us of the transnational context of anti-Semitism and racism, an understanding that has added a lot to Holocaust Studies recently.⁷ More importantly, the application of Nazi racism to the German speaking communities in America was not accidental, but rather the result of a decades-old anti-modernist German understanding of the links between modernity, America, and the Jews.⁸ To anti-modernists and anti-Semites, no other nation more symbolized the ideas of the French and American Revolutions, two events that had also set off the process of Jewish emancipation. For anti-Semites, America was symbolic for empowering the Jew and allowing him to be a driving force and supposed sole “winner” in the modernization of society, economy, and politics.⁹

How much American Jews as well as Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany were affected by such policies, or how they have reacted to them, has largely been ignored and offers an interesting example of how long-distance nationalism polarized German speakers in the United States, particularly in the New York City area, where German-Americans, American Jews, refugees, and the Nazi movement intensively interacted with each other. Finally it is important to note that the Nazis’ impact on German-America severed a cultural link, which had been an essential part of the relationship between non-Jewish Germans and German Jews in the United...