Golden Land and Promised City, Revisited

The eminent sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who grew up in Harlem in the 1930s, remembered that experience as being "a vilified Jewish minority within a mortified black minority." Horowitz, whose memoir is quoted in Jeffrey S. Gurock's comprehensive new book about Harlem, also mentioned how fellow Jews, who "fled to greener parts of New York City," looked at those who stayed behind: other Jews viewed Harlem's Jews as "social scourges and economic failures—simply by virtue of the fact that they remained" in a black neighborhood (p. 183).

When Jewish sources described America, they often vacillated between the "goldene medine" (the golden land/country) and the "treyfene medine" (the impure/non-kosher land). The former relates to the images of America among Jewish immigrants as the land of infinite economic opportunities and religious freedom. On the other hand, rabbis and traditionalists in Eastern Europe used the latter term to describe the United States as a place where Judaism was abandoned, observance neglected, rabbinical authority dismissed, and the learned elite was pushed aside as common tailors and cobblers ruled the community.

Within the golden land, New York City beckoned. Gotham made up a staggering proportion of American Jewry—by 1927, forty-four percent of all American Jews lived in the five boroughs of the city. No less important, New York was the center of the leading Jewish organizations, the strongest Jewish labor unions, a cultural hub for the burgeoning Yiddish press, literature and theatre, and headquarters for Jewish philanthropic endeavors at home and abroad. The central place of New York City in American Jewish life led historian Moses Rischin to title his seminal study of New York Jews, The Promised City: New York Jews, 1870–1914 (1962). Later he would term the city, "the Megashtetl on the Hudson." Yet when one reads Horowitz's recollection, as well as other facets in Gurock's book, New York may seem at times less promising.

Gurock is one of the leading scholars of American Jewish history. He has written or edited eighteen books, which examined a wide range of topics in studies such as A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (1997); Judaism's Encounter with American Sports (2005); Orthodox Jews in America (2009); Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920–2010 (2012); and even a counterfactual, speculative volume, The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jews, 1938–1967 (2015). It is his first book, nevertheless, which is most closely tied to the book under review. In 1978 Gurock published When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870–1930, and as he mentions, he has had "a forty-year relationship" with Harlem (p. 12). The current book revisits his first book, and continues the story of Harlem's Jews to the present.

One of Gurock's main arguments is that the history of Harlem's Jews was never "a localized saga" (p. 244). Whether one examines the evolution of the American synagogue, the gradual emergence of Conservative Judaism as separate from Orthodox Judaism, the relationship between Central European, affluent Jews and their poorer Eastern European co-ethnics, patterns of urban settlement and upward mobility, and Jewish-Black relations—the story of Harlem's Jews has an "enduring relevance" (p. 245). It is not just the past of that Jewish community which is significant, but also its uncertain future. Just as the earliest Jews in Harlem of the 1870s encountered many difficulties "in convincing their fellow Jews that the faith was worth perpetuating," many of the young Jews who congregate in uptown's coffee shops and bistros tend to "dissociate themselves" from Judaism, apart from a fleeting connection to Jewish culture. The future of Harlem's Jews, therefore, "underscores the issues of Jewish identification in America" while...