Urban Origins of American Judaism

CHAPTER 3. SNAPSHOTS

112 In 1966 Allon Schoener curated a powerful and wildly popular exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York City—the exhibit was so popular, in fact, that officials extended it for several months, an unprecedented decision. The Lower East Side: Portal to American Life chronicled the world of immigrant Jews in part through snapshots drawn from newspapers.1 Schoener dramatically enlarged a number of these photos so that they covered entire walls, immersing viewers in the city streets. These innovative “photomurals” as they would subsequently be called aimed to recreate Jewish urban space within the museum’s precincts. The exhibit marked a new venture for the Jewish Museum. The first in “a series of interpretive historical exhibitions that compelled American Jews at the grass roots to take a hard and searching look at their own history,” the exhibit “enlarged the museum’s capacity for emotional engagement even as [it] deepened its role as a sophisticated purveyor of ideas.” Historian Jenna Weissman Joselit argues for the “newfound relevance of historical exhibitions to the Jewish civic imagination.” Grandparents corralled their grandchildren to see the show, producing long lines outside the museum. Schoener included drawings and paintings by Jewish artists as well as Yiddish theater posters, playbills, song sheets, and even simulated sounds of peddlers. His theatrical flair transformed museum practice and, more important for American Jews, brought photographs into a conjoined realm of art and history where they opened a window into the Jewish urban past. Photographs gave Jews a path backward into the urban origins of American Judaism. As Joselit observes, the exhibit c h a p t e r 3 SNAPSHOTS snapshots 113 “redefined the notion of history, claiming it as a visual medium, not just a textual one.”2 This chapter examines selected images that came to represent urban Judaism to American Jews. It argues that these snapshots of the past translated urban Judaism not only into the history of American Jews but also into a meaningful aspect of their lives. Viewed from suburban splitlevels or even comfortable apartments, photographs connected Jews across generations and helped them interpret and understand themselves . Placed next to family pictures, photos of the urban world prior to World War II anchored both experiences and memories of those who viewed them. Many of these photographs actually lived multiple lives, first when they were originally taken and published, and then when they were reprinted in other contexts. Their own stories and the subsequent stories each photo seemed to tell made tangible an evanescent past. Gradually, as the immigrant era faded from memory, Jews came to narrate crucial dimensions of their history through these visual images. Both Christian and Jewish observers pictured the city. Although they often held different views on what they saw, the photos themselves were interpreted as compelling narratives of Jewish engagement with the urban world. Relatively few Jews could actually get to visit the Lower East Side, but far more could enjoy pictures of their “Plymouth Rock,” or, as Schoener called it, their “portal to America.” As many Jews became documentary photographers in the twentieth century, they sought to establish a genealogy for their type of photographic practice. Thus they reclaimed old photographs from the turn of the century and gave them a new life and audience. Together these dual influences produced growing recognition of the power of photography to capture liminal moments in time and space. Snapshots froze complex transitions from Old World to New, from immigrant slum to streetcar suburb, preserving a visual record of ordinary urban behaviors. Popular photography and mass immigration arrived in American cities at roughly the same time at the turn of the last century. Art historian Rebecca Zurier observes that the “trend toward a pictorial city was economic.” Specifically she argues that the advent of national corporations “encouraged the large-scale mass production and commercial pro- chapter three 114 motion of images. . . . Partly to appeal to a new public of non-Englishspeaking or illiterate consumers who now wielded discretionary income, advertising at this time began to rely upon pictures rather than text.”3 This coincidence, along with technological changes that facilitated reproduction of photographs, also encouraged identification of Jews as immigrants. In addition interest in both the camera’s potential for social work, that is, to promote social reform, and political uses of photography provided an impetus for enduring portraits of immigrant Jews. Most images of immigrant...