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• • 58 3 The Unconventional Rabbi J u da h M agn e s arrived in New York in August 1904 thrilled to be in such a flurry of Jewish activity. Full of youthful vigor and confidence, for several years the young rabbi had envisioned himself at the center of Jewish public life. Now, finally, he felt he would have the opportunity to place his energized spirit as a powerful force that would shape the future of American Jewry. “I shall be in the great center of the Jewish population,” he wrote in his diary, which “gives me the opportunity of coming into firsthand contact with the problems of Jewish immigration.”1 When Magnes arrived, tensions existed within the New York Jewish community between Reform and Orthodox, between German and Eastern European Jews, about what it meant to be Jewish in America. By challenging Reform German Jews from within rather than from without, Magnes engaged German Reform Jews in a dialogue about assimilation, Jewish traditions , and Jewish identity. His challenges engulfed him in controversy. These controversies, however, were not symptoms of Magnes’s alienation from the main trends in American Judaism; rather, they revealed the extent to which he represented a transition point for American Judaism. Although Magnes was seen as a rebel within American Reform Judaism, his views mirrored a new direction for American Judaism, one that sought to return to Jewish traditions and promote a strong sense of Jewish peoplehood. American Reform Judaism would begin to follow this path by the 1930s, but in the first decade of the twentieth century, with very few exceptions, it was not yet ready for Magnes or the transformation he proposed.2 At the turn of the century, New York was a city characterized by ethnic diversity. Thirty-seven percent of the three and a half million residents were foreign born, many of them Eastern European Jews. Jews from Eastern Europe had immigrated to America prior to the 1880s (Magnes’s father and uncle being just two examples), but the first massive wave of Eastern European Jews entered America in 1881 as they fled Russian pogroms. A The Unconventional Rabbi | 59 little over three thousand Russian Jews immigrated in 1881 and more than three times that the following year. This rate of immigration dramatically increased through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century . When Magnes returned home from Germany in 1904, more than one hundred five thousand Jews immigrated to America, the majority of whom came from Russia in response to the Kishinev pogroms. The Jewish immigration was part of the larger immigration of twenty-three million people into the United States between 1880 and 1920, seventeen million of whom came through New York. The majority of the Eastern European Jews settled on the Lower East Side of New York, the area east of the Bowery and below Houston Street that consists of about twenty square blocks. The number of residents per acre averaged as much as one thousand, which produced overcrowded and impoverished conditions.3 On the Lower East Side, Eastern European Jews tried to rekindle their shtetl life and culture. They subdivided their neighborhoods into ethnic enclaves of Hungarians, Galicians, Romanians, and Russian Jews.4 Eastern European Jews also created a thriving Yiddish culture. The Yiddish theater emerged as the main downtown cultural institution. Yiddish writers, intellectuals, and radicals also participated in the vibrant Yiddish culture through the written word.5 Meanwhile, during the late nineteenth century, New York’s German Jews developed into a “solid” middle class that achieved their greatest success in banking and the clothing business. The Eastern European immigration into New York sparked an intense reaction from the German Jewish elite,6 who feared that the poor and less assimilated Russian Jews would prompt an increase in American anti-Semitism. Some German Jews promoted colonization plans to various parts of the United States to overcome the overcrowding problems. Others, presenting the immigrants as hard working and ready to blend themselves into American society, claimed that anti-Semitism would not increase if Russian Jews were assimilated into American society.7 Through educational institutions German Jews hoped to encourage the immigrants to shed their traditions while introducing them to modern American values.8 Behind the Americanization efforts lurked disdain for the Eastern European Jews. Many Reform rabbis were particularly scornful. They feared that their own influence and authority over the American Jewish community would be subverted by Orthodox Jewish immigrants. To ensure their dominance and expand their...

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