The 6 million Americans of Jewish origin, 2.5 percent of the population, are the descendants of immigrants who arrived in waves from different parts of Europe from colonial times to the present. Despite dissimilar cultural backgrounds and political experiences in their countries of origin, Jews share a sense of being one people. They possess a past that extends back to biblical times, and a common religion, Judaism, that sanctifies that history. In addition, the experience of being a persecuted minority in a hostile world has left an indelible mark on Jewish consciousness.
In the 1830s, a large influx of Jews began arriving from German-speaking central Europe. They came as a result of anti-Jewish legislation and the disruption of the peasant economy. Because the United States was expanding westward, many Jews became peddlers and prospered by serving as links between the larger cities and rural areas. In a relatively short time, large numbers of German Jews had acquired the means to become small merchants. The more successful became wholesalers and bankers. A few gained prominence by establishing department stores or manufacturing ready-made clothing.
By 1880 there were 250,000 Jews in America, and over the next forty years, 2.5 million more arrived, nearly all from eastern Europe. This mass exodus was the result of several factors: rapid industrialization, which displaced many Jewish artisans and petty merchants; an enormous growth in the Jewish population, which exacerbated economic conditions; harsh discriminatory laws imposed by the czarist government; and the sporadic outbreak of pogroms. The great majority of these immigrants — 60 percent of whom were skilled workers — settled in the large cities of the East and Midwest, especially in places where the clothing industry was important. New York, the largest center of the industry, contained 45 percent of the nearly 3.5 million Jews in the United States in 1920, forming a quarter of the city's population.
The immigration restriction laws of 1924 severely limited Jewish immigration for some years, but from 1935 to 1941, about 150,000 refugees from Nazi Germany entered the country. Of middle-class background, often professionals, these immigrants included scores of internationally famous scientists, social scientists, and artists. The most distinguished among them was the Nobel laureate in physics, Albert Einstein. Most of the refugees settled in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
During the years following the end of World War II, a similar number, survivors of the Holocaust, arrived. A remnant of the Jewish communities of Europe, they were assisted by relatives and American Jewish welfare agencies to begin life anew. From the 1960s to the 1990s, about 350,000 Jews came from Hungary, Israel, the Soviet Union, South Africa, and Iran because of political turmoil or economic distress.
By the 1880s, Jews of German origin, most of whom belonged to Reformed temples and were quite affluent, created an impressive network of philanthropic and cultural institutions — Young Men's Hebrew Associations, agencies to aid the Jewish poor, and fraternal orders like B'nai B'rith, the largest of its kind. These institutions helped meet the needs of the impoverished immigrants from eastern Europe.
The East European Jewish immigrants, who crowded into the poorer neighborhoods of the big cities around the turn of the century, created their own culture in the Yiddish language. Eleven Yiddish dailies were published in America in 1916. Dozens of literary and political weeklies, Yiddish theaters (seven in New York alone in 1918), lectures on political and cultural topics, and a stream of belles lettres of high quality were expressions of a vital culture that lasted for a generation and left behind a rich legacy. The immigrants also formed a vast network of mutual aid societies and Orthodox congregations based on town of origin. Composing another part of the community were the garment industry trade unions organized and led by Jewish radicals and containing a majority of Jewish workers well into the 1920s. Socialism had many followers. Zionism — the belief that rebuilding Palestine as a Jewish state was necessary as a haven for persecuted Jews and as a guarantee of ethnic cultural survival — became an influential movement only after World War I.
As these Jews rose economically and socially, which they did with relative speed, they moved to better neighborhoods and underwent a process of rapid acculturation. The second generation saw education as the path to upward mobility. Many entered the professions of teaching, law, medicine, dentistry, and accounting, but the majority achieved middle-class status through commerce. This process of acculturation affected the Jewish community in a number of ways. Conservative Judaism, which maintained only selected traditional practices, accommodated itself to both the social and the religious needs of its middle-class members and grew quickly. Modern Orthodoxy made only minor modifications in religious customs and grew at a slower pace. Jewish community centers provided recreational, cultural, and social activities and attracted Jews with no synagogue affiliation. To meet communal needs and to aid Jews in distress in Europe, federations of Jewish philanthropies were created in nearly every Jewish community. They coordinated communal policy and undertook annual campaigns to raise funds for many activities, including Zionist colonization work in Palestine. Another concern that elicited much communal activity was the discrimination American Jews encountered in higher education, employment, and housing.
After World War II, American Jewry found itself the largest, most affluent, and most politically influential Jewish community in the world. Almost without exception, American Jews joined the efforts to alleviate the plight of those who had survived the Holocaust by supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as a home for them. They lobbied vigorously for government support for the establishment of a Jewish state and then for economic and military assistance to Israel. American Jews also contributed large sums of money to support the resettlement of refugees there. Financial and political support for Israel, which still serves as an asylum for Jews from Europe and Muslim countries, continues to be of paramount concern to American Jews.
In their political preference, most Jews, beginning with the New Deal, have supported the liberal wing of the Democratic party. They have favored strong social welfare, civil rights and equal opportunity legislation, strict separation of church and state, and an activist foreign policy.
The postwar period also witnessed strong cultural advances among American Jews. The numbers receiving a college education were extraordinarily high. Novelists of Jewish origin — like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud — have been widely acclaimed. Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer each won the Nobel Prize in literature. The social integration of Jews into American society was indicated by the rate of intermarriage, which rose from about 6 percent in 1950 to over 30 percent in 1990. For Jews committed to maintaining Jewish group identity, the rising incidence of intermarriage became a matter of much concern. The various denominations have been striving to deepen the spiritual content of Jewish ethnic identity, with Jewish religious education more extensive than ever. And Jewish studies have been introduced at hundreds of Jewish and secular colleges and universities.
America's Jews at the end of the century have retained their sense of community through their shared group identity, their concern for Israel's future, the still painful memories of the Holocaust, and the ever-present need to guard against anti-Jewish discrimination.