A Study in American Jewish Leadership

ing the lifetime of the owner. The two men also agreed on the value of endowing institutions of a permanent social value like mu ...

diction, or melancholia—had no place in most private hospitals. Mount Sinai, the first Jewish hospital in New York, sent incurab ...

expertise and practical assistance. Only after his death was a personal con- cern of Schiff’s added to the experimental agenda. ...

patients, and finally Mr. Schiff opened the door of a small room the only occupant of which was a young boy lying upon a bed fro ...

Jewish holidays. Citing a talmudic precept, albeit out of context, he main- tained that it was better even to work on the Sabbat ...

giving also underlined the harmony between Jewish philanthropy and American values. Several years later, at the dedication of Mo ...

ment for Jews and Gentiles by the government was nonnegotiable. Private agencies that claimed to represent a public constituency ...

the charge of discrimination came only from some of the “lower grade.” Schiff retorted that liquidation of the exchange was pref ...

the discrimination of elitist cultural institutions and opinion molders. With great passion he explained to Bishop Potter: “When ...

could not be controlled. But he made use of his wealth and contacts to combat its manifestations. Similar prejudice in Germany c ...

Manhattan, and representing a very considerable portion of its intelli- gence, wealth and producing capacity, furnishing, moreov ...

dents at the college, an interest that was matched by a determination to in- vestigate all complaints of prejudice.^99 Schiff fa ...

than to show that Jews and Jewish thought had influenced the development of American culture and indeed of modern civilization? ...

Christianity and many American institutions and concepts of government derived from the Hebrew Bible promised to awaken Christia ...

scholarly layman among us,” comforted his friend by pointing out the value of displaying the few unearthed artifacts along those ...

enrollments, Schiff pushed, but to no avail, for renewed interest by the ad- ministration. Although the department was like “a c ...

contributed to a wide variety of schools—from Talmud Torahs for young- sters to seminaries and institutes for the training of ra ...

Modernized education and scholarship for the survival of Judaism, but survival toward what end? Schiff generally ignored questio ...

3 The New Immigrants For over thirty years the problems of eastern European immigrants to the United States eclipsed all other p ...

shores in the 1880s, 300,000 in the 1890s, and another 1.5 million between 1900 and World War I. American Jews were neither prep ...