Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, Its Structure and Culture (review)

108 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 society through new techniques ofmass marketing ofwhat they themselves viewed as the fulfillment of the American dream. Sydney Stahl Weinberg Department of American Studies Ramapo College of New Jersey. Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, Its Structure and Culture, by Steven M. Lowenstein. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. Immigrant communities hold precious secrets about how people collectively assure the continuity of their culture even as they adapt to new social circumstances, and thereby change the very thing they are trying to preserve. No such community is a simple transplant of the old, nor its preservation a simple matter of building a bulwark against the new social circumstances. Processes of preservation as well as transformation go on simultaneously, and both progress through an often tension-filled dialogue within as well as between the individuals who make up the community. To capture those subtle, nuanced dialogues, to understand their motivations and sources of power, and to portray their results within the social fabric of a community is the complex challenge of the social scientists who would chronicle the life of an immigrant community. In this fine work of scholarship Steven M. Lowenstein, himself a child of Washington Heights German Jews, ably combines an exactingly precise description of the demographic characteristics and cultural institutions built by German-Jewish immigrants fleeing from Hitler and settling at the south-western edge of Ft. Tryon Park in upper Manhattan, with loving attention to their mentality and social habits. Because of its detailed scholarly workmanship Lowenstein's book serves both as a robust memorial to a community now very much on the wane and also as an important academic resource for those who might wish to make comparisons between this immigrant community and others. The reader is treated to a thorough description of many of the local congregations, schools, and other ancillary cultural institutions founded by the immigrants. The maps and charts along with the photographs give the reader a strong sense of place so that one can almost feel oneself walking through the neighborhood. Lowenstein also provides personal accounts, as only an insider can, of some of the key leaders who gave the community its shape and character. His extensive notes to each chapter will prove a Book Reviews 109 treasure trove of memorabilia to interested local readers as well as to future historians. For all its many virtues the book is bound to provoke at least some frustration for readers who are not as fascinated with Jewish Orthodoxy in general and German Jewish Orthodoxy in particular as the author seems to be. Although Lowenstein acknowledges time and again that the Orthodox constituted a minority among both the German Jews and the rest of Jewry in Washington Heights, the bulk of the book is devoted to Orthodox institutions and their struggles with Americanism, modernity and secularization. It is understandable that the Orthodox had the greatest struggles with these social forces. But one would have liked to get a sense of how others, whom he describes as "urban-liberal" on the one hand and "rural" on the other, contended with those same transformative pressures. One would also have liked to have a clearer'sense of how the Orthodox, the "urban liberals" and the "rurals" related to one another in contradistinction to their relationships with their non-German neighbors. Was there, indeed, a German-Jewish community in Washington Heights or merely a diverse aggregate of German-Jewish immigrants who created a number of contiguous sub-communities with very little sense of unity among them? Indeed, what is missing at least for this reader (who lived in Washington Heights from 1974 to 1986) is a description and analysis of relationships in the normal flux of life. The author provides richly detailed still-life portraits, but offers little of the ebb-and-flow of interactions between various sub-groups of German-Jews or between German-Jews and their neighbors. Although a relative late-comer into the community, this reviewer nevertheless had the opportunity to observe it for twelve years, participate in the life of two of its synagogues (one Orthodox and one Conservative), and...