East European Jewish Detroit in the Early Twentieth Century

Judaism, Summer, 2000 by Kenneth Waltzer

Identity choices and steps toward building a united Detroit Jewish community were also impacted by the responses of East European and German Jews to the rising threats to Jews and Jewish life in Michigan. After World War I, the tenor of talk about Jews changed in the city. There was less reassuring chatter about people who would make their way upward or become good citizens and more serious talk about people who rose too quickly and were threats to the American way of life. Such attacks included criticisms of Jews by Detroit Polish newspapers like Dziennik Polski (the Polish Daily News), which in early 1919 condemned Jews as usurers, thieves, white slavers, and subversives. "A mean nation does not deserve to exist in the world," the Polish newspaper proclaimed. [41] They included also the growing threat of the Ku Klux Klan, which claimed nearly 90,000 members in Michigan during the early 1920s (the largest Klan group in the country), with a powerful contingent present in Wayne County. A Klan write in candida te came close to winning the mayoralty in 1924. [42] Klan-type activities continued into the depression 1930s, as the Black Legion, once the elite "Black Guard" of the KKK, escalated to independent night-riding actions in areas near the city. The most important challenge to a tolerant Detroit during the early 1920s was the virulent assault by Henry Ford and the Dearborn Independent, which Ford published, against Jews as a group. Copies of this hateful publication, compiled as The International Jew and circulated widely in Michigan, identified world Jewry as the most powerful conspiratorial nation in the world, the nation of "Judaan." Ford's Dearborn Independent introduced the scurrilous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into the United States and attacked American movies and jazz as "Jewish fifth" and "Yiddish moron music." [43] East European Jews lived and were making it in a city that had been transformed and modernized by a man who was an American hero and the largest employer in the area, but who was also a nasty antisemite.

Finally, choices about identity and community building were also shaped by the everyday challenges to getting and making a living and advancing in the world, and in response to social changes and the new modem consumer culture. East European Jews struggled with questions about how to seek opportunity in postwar America in Detroit, and how to handle the tasks of daily life in a spreading metropolis. They adjusted to an exploding modem urban culture marked by expanding consumer choices and shaped by bright lights, newspapers, moving pictures, phonographs, music records, and other attractions. Young men pursued paths different from their fathers, some through higher education, despite troubling quotas that continued to limit access by Jews to the professions into the 1940s, others through illegal activities such as bootlegging, squeezing local merchants, and gang involvement. [44] Young women also emancipated themselves, attended school and local college, and sought work until they married, and they also joined new women's organizations, mainly Jewish women's organizations. Orthodox synagogues retained East European customs but the next generation stopped attending regularly, choosing instead to go to synagogue on high holidays or for family events only. Many abandoned worship altogether. They also took up the challenges posed by the loosening of dress and behavioral codes in the 1920s. East European Jews were becoming American, moving on up out of the Hastings area into Upper Hastings and Oakland and improving their status, even as the United States and events abroad were closing off the continued migration of more Jews from Eastern Europe.