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232 GOLDBERGER AND GERSHWIN Two New York Jews Encounter the American South in the Early Twentieth Century Alan M. Kraut B etween 1870 and the early 1920s, over 2.25 million Jews emigrated from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States. Most of them entered the United States through the port of New York, and the vast majority spent at least some time in New York City, the place that historian Moses Rischin dubbed “The Promised City.”1 There those displaced by poverty and/or oppression found opportunity for employment, education, and hope, if not always a land flowing with “milk and honey.” In New York, many Jewish immigrants and their children tasted poverty in the city’s urban industrial environment even as they strove to craft a future of plenty. Through their own struggles and those of their neighbors, they learned firsthand about the interplay of poverty, culture, and society. Two such children of the “Promised City” were a physician, Dr. Joseph Goldberger , and a musical composer, George Gershwin. Raised and educated in the urban cauldrons of New York’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn streets, respectively , Goldberger and Gershwin each achieved world renown in their respective fields. What they had in common besides their religious heritage and immigrant pasts was that each applied their understanding of poverty’s constraints and the accompanying social marginalization to illuminate the American South, a region still struggling to reconcile its past with the modernity of the twentieth century. Poor southerners, like poor Jews, were in search of a “promised land.” For many Americans the South has been synonymous with mystery or enigma, difficult to completely understand and reconcile with the democratic values, egalitarian aspirations, and industrial development overtly embraced XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 233 Two New York Jews Encounter the American South by the rest of the nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “A kind of sphinx on the American land” was how one southern historian, David Potter, characterized the states south of the Mason-Dixon line.2 If the South was a mystery, it also at times bore the burden of historic tragedy. The punishment for the sin of slavery was conquest and military occupation, according to the great southern scholar, C. Vann Woodward.3 It is this sense of historic tragedy that southerners shared with other groups in the United States, defined by racial, religious, or ethnic identity. One such group was the Jews. Present in North America since 1654, Jews had played signi ficant roles in the life of the South Atlantic region since the colonial era. Before the Civil War, Christians often encountered Sephardic or German Jewish merchants in port cities such as Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans. Other encounters were in the small towns where Jewish peddlers, mostly German immigrants , chose to settle and open small stores. And still other encounters occurred when southerners traveled to the North on business or leisure.4 Over ten thousand Jews fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and one Jew, Judah P. Benjamin, served as President Jefferson Davis’s attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state during the Confederacy’s brief existence.5 In the decades after the Civil War, Jewish immigration to the United States increased, largely from Southern and Eastern Europe. While most Eastern European Jews headed for the factories and shops of the North, some did settle in southern towns and cities. Interestingly, the arts as much as commerce served to create ties between the regions. Journalist and humorist Harry Golden, born Herschel Goldhirsh in Mikulintsky, Ukraine, and raised in New York, the publisher of the Carolina Israelite, gave mid-twentieth-century northern Jews a window on what life was like for their southern cousins in a syndicated column and book.6 Meanwhile, young, ambitious southern writers and intellectuals ventured into the canyons created by New York’s skyscrapers to talk to publishers and become part of the twentieth-century literary establishment. In Manhattan ’s bars and coffee houses, southern writers and New York Jewish intellectuals found more common ground than they might have expected. In his 1967 autobiography, Mississippian Willie Morris, the renowned editor of Harper’s magazine, who had encountered so many Jews in the publishing capital of the country, recalled: On a fall afternoon in 1966 I sat in a bar on Third Avenue with Norman Podhoretz , Midge Decter, and Marion Magid, who were then involved in editing [3.141.244.201] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 15:31 GMT...

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