Volume 32, Number 18 · November 21, 1985
The Triumph of the Jews
By Arthur Hertzberg
A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today
by Charles E. Silberman
Summit, 458 pp., $19.95
For at least a century, Jews in America have worried about three main issues: their success in establishing themselves in American society; their continuity as a community; and their legitimacy, that is, their justification to themselves of the value of being Jews. Their concerns about worldly success were always connected with the fear of anti-Semitism. Hatred of Jews did not have economic effects until the mass immigration of the 1880s. The German Jews who arrived before then had often been subjected to social discrimination, but this didn't prevent them from doing well in business. Roughly half of the German Jewish immigrants settled in the rapidly expanding cities of the West and South, where their skills as middlemen were welcome.
Review, 4737 words
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