German-Jewish Identities in America (review)

A conference on German-Jewish Identities in America, held at the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in October 2000, forms the basis for this collection of essays. With nine contributions covering a wide range of topics and approaches, the volume opens new windows into how Jewishness, Germanness, and Americanization have intersected in the German Jewish experience in America. In what originally was the keynote address of the conference, Henry Feingold shares his observations on the balance between Judaism and Americanization that German-Jewish immigrants to the New World created—or, according to Feingold, also failed to create.

In the first of three contributions on the role and function of Jewish charity organizations in the building of American Jewish community and identity, Anke Ortlepp reports on the development of Jewish philanthropy in Milwaukee between 1850 and 1914. The following essay by Tobias Brinkmann represents one of the highlights of the volume. Indeed, the fact that some authors in this collection still refer to nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from Western and Central Europe plainly as "German Jews" without taking into account newer and even less recent scholarship that has refined and questioned the concept "German Jews" is surprising.¹ Brinkmann, however, convinces with a complex reading of the interplay between German and Jewish aspects of German-Jewish immigrants' identities in Chicago before 1880. As he does in more detail in his book-length study, Brinkmann describes the ethnicization of Jewishness in a German key that took place in the Chicago Jewish community. He thereby challenges established interpretations of what constitutes Americanization and what represents the continuity of a European cultural matrix in immigrants' attitudes and actions.² Cornelia Wilhelm, in her essay on the founding and development of the Jewish order B'nai B'rith, likewise offers fresh insights into how German notions of respectability and Jewishness shaped the formation of American Jewish identity and the emergence of new modes of collective organization. Yet her essay would have profited from a more careful evaluation of the European precedents for American Jewish associational life, and the absence of a gender analysis is striking in this otherwise compelling and important portrait of an exclusively male confraternity.

Mitchell B. Hart approaches the interplay of German, Jewish, and American identities from a different angle, as he interprets the choices that the Jewish, German-born anthropologist Franz Boas made in the first decades of the twentieth century. Hart argues that Boas's downplaying of his Jewish identity and his positioning himself as German and American was a strategy of self-representation. Boas used this strategy successfully to defend the racial equality of Jews from Eastern Europe and their ability to adapt to American society. In an equally stimulating and innovative contribution, Harley Erdman shows that Jews of primarily, yet not exclusively, German descent from places such as Cincinnati and Sandusky had become a central force in the New York show business by the mid 1890s. Artists from a variety of backgrounds performed ethnic German and "Hebrew" comedies, and eventually some of them even participated in creating the myth of Lower East Side Yidishkayt as the cradle of American Jewish creativity in the realm of performative art. Thomas Kovach, in his essay on Alfred Uhry's 1997 play Last Night of Ballyhoo (set in 1939 Atlanta) also focuses on theater and on the encounter between recent Jewish immigrants and an already established Jewry. In his analysis of the play, Kovach points to a parallelism between the Jewish experience in Germany and the experience of Jews in the American South that may deserve to be explored in greater depth.

Monika S. Schmid shifts our attention to Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany. Based on the linguistic analysis of a selection of thirty-five interviews with Jews from Germany, Schmid found that the severity of the...