Tired, nor so Poor in Faith: Jewish

¶ … Tired, nor So Poor in Faith:

Jewish and Italian Immigration in Early 20th Century America

According to Nancy Foner's work, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration, "Emma Lazarus was wrong." The author of the famous poem emblazoned at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Foner states, was inaccurate in her portrayal of immigrants to America as tired and huddled masses, simply yearning to breathe free. (Foner, Chapter 1) Instead, the "reasons why millions have left their homelands to come to America are complex and multifaceted. It has always been too simple to see immigration to this country as a quest for liberty and freedom." The quest for stability and community has proved equally important throughout the nation's history.

Foner points out that the majority of immigrants today come to the United States not by boat, but by airplane. "The extraordinary ethnic diversity of today's immigrants is matched by the variety of their occupational and class backgrounds -- from poor farmers and factory workers to physicians, engineers, and scientists." (Foner, Chapter 1) They often are from the professional classes of their home countries. She contrasts this with the conventional image and character of the Island's earliest refugees, mainly "Italian" and "Russian Jews." Furthermore, as Hasia Diner's Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America and Robert Orsi's text on The Madonna of 119th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 also make clear, these groups actual experience during the first wave of immigration do not necessarily fit stereotypical ideals of immigrants yearning to breath free either. Instead, seeking a more productive future, these Jewish and Italian immigrants transplanted and reformed the familial and fraternal religious organizations from their homeland anew in America. These immigrants came, not just seeking freedom, but a new place in which to lay down new and more stable professional roots. As noted by Foner as well, "Whatever the initial causes, once set in motion, immigration movements become self-perpetuating." (Foner, Chapter 1) This means that migration is not simply movement and flight, but also a process of network building through the movement of people back and forth in space. Initial networks of families create structures in the new land in such a way that migrants can encourage and sponsor friends and relatives to join them.

Jewish immigrants, says Foner, were not "from the depths of their societies." In other words, high proportions of the Jewish immigrants to America were skilled rather than unskilled laborers. They did not come "naked," but possessed a marketable trade, often tailors, carpenters, dressmakers, and shoemakers. These individuals thus could be resourceful in setting up their own businesses. They often had or could develop connections to larger professional and social networks than cast-off individuals. Their immediate integration into the professional life of a community because of their skills, combined with the theological centrality of the synagogue facilitated these immigrant's integration into the American economic fabric in a way that still allowed them to retain their essentially Jewish character.

Hasia Diner contrasts this reality, with the image popular amongst Jewish audiences today, "consumers of lectures, public programs, films, and novels" who continue to insist on the memory of the tradition-bounded shtetl Jews who chose America as they fled pogroms. (Diner, Introduction) The children of these tailors, shoemakers, and dressmakers may enjoy consuming cultural images of the destitute ancestor who came with nothing, but this cultural image is belied by statistical reality. The discrepancy between fantasy and reality demonstrates why accounts Emma Beckerman's 1980 memoir of hard times as an immigrant girl on Rivington Street at the turn of the twentieth century could easily conflate descriptions of hunger with memories of wonderful food. There was hunger amongst some families, at some times, but networks of relatively well off neighbors could provide sustenance for those Jewish neighbors also in need.

The role of religion in creating networks of individuals and keeping families together was also key to the immigration experience for largely peasant, Catholic Italian-American. It is noteworthy that, contrary to popular image, "even though Italian immigrants were from "primarily a peasant migration from the agricultural regions of the south...those most likely to leave Italy for America were in the middle and lower-middle levels of the peasantry rather than day laborers with no land at all." (Foner, Chapter 1) Robert Orsi also stresses that these relatively well off Italian peasant immigrants, although hailing from a variety of locations within the Italian peninsula, were able to create a collective cultural fusion of a "theology of the streets." (Orsi, Chapter 6)