Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-82, Its Structure and Culture

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. In the course of my study I have found that I was not the only person who saw the discrepancy between the conventional picture of German Jewry and the community in which Ihad grown up. Rabbi Max Gruenewald, former president of the LeoBaeck Institute, informed me in a letter that he had often suggested that a book be written about "the real German Jew" and that a study of Washington Heights should be a part of it. The implication was quite clear—the assimilated Jew in most studies of German Jewry was not "the real German Jew."Similarly, when I interviewed a former Washington Heights resident of my generation, she told me she hoped that "in your book you'll dispel the reputation that German Jews have gotten"—that they were assimilated and not really Jewish. A similar sentiment was expressed in a German-languageletter to the editor of theWashington Heights-based Jewish Way (June-July 1958): "All too often in the U.S.A., we have to hear that Jews from Germany were completely assimilated and didn't want to have anything to do with Judaism.I have often translated and read aloud your editorials for my American coworkers. They were amazed that such a Jewishly conscious, enlightening, and valuablenewspaper exists in the German language." 2. See, for instance, Samuel C. Heilman, Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1976). 1. REFUGE FROM GERMANY 1. This is the estimate by Werner Rosenstock of the number of refugees from Germany living in the United States in 1954 ("Exodus 1933-1939: Survey of Jewish Emigration from Germany," Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute [YLBI] 1 [1956], p. 390). In the period up to 1943, 97,374 Jews born in Germany were admitted to the United States on quota immigration (Herbert Strauss, "The Immigra270 Notes to Pages 23-28 tion and Acculturation of the German Jews in the United States of America," YLBI 16(1971], pp. 69-70). The number of nonquota immigrants is hard to determine. 2. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration : Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Donald Peterson Kent, The Refugee Intellectual: The Americanization of the Immigrants of 19331941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953); farrell C. Jackman and Carla M. Borden, eds., The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 19301945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983). 3. Maurice R. Davie, Refugees in America: Report of the Committee for the Study of Recent Immigration from Europe (NewYork and London:Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1947), p. 42. 4. Kent, op. cit., p. 15, shows that 30.9 percent of immigrant professionals were in medicine and 10.6 percent were in law, with only 14.4 percent in the educational field. Not all of the latter groupwere college professors. 5. Whereas the majority of German immigrants to the United States in the 1930s were Jews by religion, this is not true of the intellectuals. Of the German intellectuals in Kent's study (ibid., pp. 18-19), the majority (at least 55.4 percent) were "non-Aryan" by Nazi criteria but only 16 percent stated their adherence to the Jewish religion (as against 32 percent Protestant, 6 percent Catholic, and 44 percent "not listed"). Certain authors, especially Anthony Heilbut (Exiled inParadise : German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present [NewYork: Viking Press, 1983]), stress the intellectuals' critical stance vis-à-vis American culture, as well as the fact that a number of them returned to Germany after the war. The bulk of the immigrants of the 1930s, on the other hand, tried to adjust to America and clearly rejected any thought of returning to Europe. 6. Pp. 45-46. 7. Davie, who was writing just after World War II, often strikes an apologetic tone. Despite the very impressive and well thought-out methodology of his survey, he often uses his argument to defend the refugees against various accusations including separatism, arrogance, and large numbers. His statistic that only 17.1 percent of Jewish refugees settled in New York City seems far too low, for instance. This may havesomething to dowith the wayhis sample was constructed. A sample of obituaries in Aufbau seems to show that about half the German Jews in the United States lived in New York. 2. THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN...