Jewish Life in the American West: Perspectives on Migration, Settlement, and Community (review)

"Early in February 1907 we took the train to the Promised Land" (p. 53). So wrote one of the early Jewish women pioneers to the American West, Fanny Brooks. The American West as the Promised Land for Jews!? It may seem unlikely, but not all Jews remained ensconced in eastern cities and not all faced east in search for their Zion. Through photographs and scholarly essays, Ava F. Kahn's edited book, Jewish Life in the American West, explores the promises the West held for American Jews.

The book is the catalog for an exhibition displayed at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles, a show that explored the complex and wide-ranging experience of Jews of the American West beginning in the 1850s and ending with the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which limited Jewish immigration to America. Kahn explains, "The West is a varied landscape with many regional differences; the Jewish West is even more complex" (p. 76). The photographs tell at least as convincing a tale of complexity as the essays; we are much more accustomed to seeing pictures of Jewish men studying the Torah or stitching fabric in a sweatshop, for example, than on horseback wearing cowboy suits, complete with chaps and rifles.

Essays by Hasia Diner, William Toll, Ava Kahn, and Ellen Eisenberg, and an afterword by Moses Rischin, examine these Jews' successes and failures. Diner's article forces readers interested in assessing American Jewish life to move beyond New York, the standard measure of Jewish experience. Diner recognizes New York's centrality to American Jewish history but argues that the migration of Jews out of New York deserves study on its own terms. Kahn, Toll, and Eisenberg each contribute to the telling of those stories. Kahn looks at the trajectory of four Jewish women, focusing specifically on their leadership roles in their communities. Toll examines Jewish frontier merchants and asks, "How had these sons of Europe's pariahs managed to emerge as civic leaders in the new land?" (p. 85). Part of his answer lies in the family networks that sustained various ethnic groups, including Jews, and enabled individual business enterprises to flourish. Eisenberg's chapter explains how hundreds of Jewish settlers, particularly those from Eastern Europe and inspired by agrarian and socialist ideologies, established farming colonies in several western states. Even failures, she argues, affected Jewish settlement patterns in other western Jewish communities.

Much of the book's tone is celebratory, which is appropriate given these settlers' triumphs in overcoming countless obstacles to achieve numerous successes. Yet does an emphasis on accomplishment obscure other compelling and less victorious battles? For instance, Kahn explains how the San Francisco Board of Education expanded its membership to give Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, and Labor interests a voice—not necessarily to be more inclusive, but to reduce the hitherto dominant Catholic influence. Amid anti-Catholicism, might there not have been antisemitism as well? Discussion of antisemitism, either its existence or scarcity, is largely absent, however. Similarly, Kahn's account of Fanny Brooks, an emigrant to Salt Lake City who negotiated permission for Mormons to rent property from non-Mormon "gentiles" (a Mormon category that included Jews), celebrates the accomplishment but is not contextualized by analysis of barriers Jews faced in their interactions with the larger, non-Jewish public.

Of course, no one exhibit can do it all, and this may be the signature of an engaging book. Readers will want to learn more about its subject.