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5. Homegrown Heroism
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138 > 139 servative (the middle of the road), and Orthodox (the most traditionally observant) branches of Judaism each produced rabbis trained in their distinct approaches, who served affiliated congregations composed of dues-paying members. Now, rabbis seldom battled each other. They usually reserved their rhetoric about Maccabean heroism for inspiring their own congregants to greater religious devotion, rather than to confront rabbis linked to other denominations over Jewish leadership. Nor did American Jews in the twenties and thirties talk much about the importance of synagogue and charitable-society Hanukkah festivals for Jewish children—those had become commonplace. Among Jewish adults, the great exuberance with which new immigrants had aggrandized Hanukkah with public concerts, poetry, songbooks, food, and presents, by the twenties, also had subsided into familiar, but smaller, annual activities. New media technologies such as records and movies drew audiences away from large Hanukkah concerts that had been so popular only a decade before. As immigrants and their grown children relocated to new neighborhoods far from the very dense Jewish enclaves immigrants had created, distances further diminished the likelihood of gathering a large audience for a Hanukkah concert. Yet, in the confusing and challenging years between the end of World War I and the end of World War II, American Jews once again found that Hanukkah provided a vehicle for thinking about their own contemporary Jewish issues. The holiday about dedication became a palimpsest for expressing their own concerns. For example, original amateur Hanukkah dramas for adults and children, performed in myriad clubs and schools, expressed fears of another kind of “death from pleasure” than the Yiddishe Tageblatt had warned against in 1907. Then, that newspapers’ editors had told immigrants that indulging too much in America’s abundance might erase the special luxury that holidays typically brought to Jewish homes and thus emotionally flatten the religious high points in the Jewish calendar. Now, in the twenties, through creative dramas and plays, Jews voiced fears that some of their peers, and many of their children, might abandon both their religion and their religious community in its time of need as they stepped into the welcoming arms of America’s larger gentile culture to enjoy the pleasure of total acceptance. But how welcoming was America? Original Hanukkah dramas from [107.21.176.63] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:08 GMT) 140 > 141 immigration quotas.”2 Those quotas ultimately made it impossible for all but a comparative handful of Europe’s Jews to escape Nazism. Groups also often organized entertaining holiday events to keep their members involved despite the popular attractions of theater and the newfound intrigue of movies. The leisure time of Jews, like all Americans , was ever more contested as the century wore on. Rates of membership in all kinds of organizations dipped across the country during the Great Depression, as incomes dropped, but picked up again, at least for women, during World War II. At Hanukkah, otherwise lighthearted social events could turn serious, as the story about loyalists and Hellenists became a metaphor for the growing anxieties about the Jewish future. Just as alarming as antisemitism was that the American Jewish population had stopped growing. First, severe immigration restrictions cut off new arrivals. Second, many Jews in the United States successfully used the techniques made available by the new birth-control movement that emerged in this era. When Deenah and Max Kaminker came to America from the Ukraine shortly after the turn of the century, they brought their five young children. Yet their three daughters collectively produced only four children.3 Now, more than ever, it seemed, the loyalty of every American Jew mattered. New original short dramas performed by amateurs addressed those concerns amid otherwise convivial occasions. Lively Hanukkah events helped many Jewish organizations retain members despite changing conditions. Landsmanschaftn, for example, began as new immigrants helped each other adjust to America but continued to provide a warm social life long after their members ceased to look to them for aid. For the Boyerke landsmanschaft in New York, for example, the annual Hanukkah party became the largest social event of their year and drew people from new homes far from immigrant neighborhoods.4 In the 1920s and 1930s, many Jews joined the Boyerkes in scattering beyond immigrant enclaves. In New York, new apartment buildings and neighborhoods grew up along new subway and bus lines and new highway routes. As Jews wended their way around neighborhoods and apartment buildings restricted to white Christians, they identified welcoming locations. They moved...