immigration, the grown-up children of immigrants, once they achieved a
measure of financial success and stability, relocated out of the Lower East
Side and immigrant neighborhoods of other cities to new neighborhoods.
The migration of Jews away from immigrant neighborhoods, among other
things, meant that synagogues and other aspects of communal life were no
longer organized according to eastern European origins.
The children of the immigrants were almost universally fluent English
speakers. The sons of peddling and working-class immigrants often fulfilled
their parents’ aspirations by becoming self-employed businessmen or factory
owners; or, better yet, becoming doctors, lawyers, or members of some other
profession. The tendency was buttressed by the rising levels of education
among second-generation Jews. For their parents, the ultimate goals were
English literacy for themselves and a high school diploma for their children.
Second-generation Jews looked higher: a college degree. Thousands entered
urban colleges such as City College in New York or Wayne State University
in Detroit.
The vertical rise of Jews within the ranks of commerce and industry, along-
side a horizontal shift into the professions, recalled a similar occupational
shift a century earlier by western and central European Jews. Moreover, the
entry of Jews into middle-class professions reduced the Jewish labor move-
ment to a small, marginal movement within American Jewry. In addition,
universal English literacy and high school education meant that Yiddish was
no longer a major language for American Jews.
To be sure, Jews continued to face impediments to their entry into main-
stream American society, in the form of social discrimination. Elite
professions such as engineering and architecture remained closed to Jews, as
did elite neighborhoods in and around every major American city.
Moreover, while the percentage of college-educated Jews soared during the
1920s and 1930s, elite colleges and universities excluded Jews, often
through a quota system that circumvented claims of First Amendment vio-
lations by accepting applicants on the basis of geographic location. By
limiting the number of incoming students from Brooklyn or Manhattan,
and accepting students from the American hinterland, these institutions
hoped to minimize the number of Jewish students. In fact, because often
the lone applicants from hinterland cities and towns were Jews, the number
of Jewish students in most Ivy League schools increased. This upward
mobility and rising education of American Jews bred not only a sense of
belonging and rootedness, but also a sense of self-confidence. The latter
manifested itself in American Jewry’s willingness to take on Henry Ford,
the most powerful man in America during the 1920s. Ford was a rabid anti-
Semite who disseminated his disdain for Jews and published an English
translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zionin his weekly newspaper, The
Dearborn Independent.
218 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45