Jewish Life in the American West: Perspectives on Migration, Settlement, and Community

Western Folklore, Fall 2003 by Goldberg, Robert Alan

Jewish Life in the American West: Perspectives on Migration, Settlement, and Community. Edited by Ava F. Kahn. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. Pp. 144, foreword, introduction, illustrations, photographs, map, tables, bibliography, acknowledgments, index. $22.50 paper)

As a group, Jews have a keen sense of the closeness of history. They feel an urgency to tell stories about Jews in all times and all places and across all dimensions. Perhaps, this results from the idea of Jewish mission. Or, for a people in Diaspora and only recently with a nation-state, storytelling may produce the bonds of community necessary for survival. Experiences of prejudice and persecution certainly also are particularly salient to Jews and offer cues for understanding present and future.

It should be no surprise then, that historians have long traveled the Jewish trail in the American West. Historians such as Norton Stern, William Kramer, Moses Rischin, and John Livingston, among many others, have written about Jewish men and women and their religious, economic, social, political, and cultural activities west of the Mississippi River. We know of Jews in the California Gold Rush, in business, on farms, in the motion picture industry, in social movements, and in political office. We know, as well, of Jews and their interactions, both negative and positive, with their Christian neighbors. Still, much of what is written is the matter of segmented pieces of a mosaic without sense of the broader whole. Missing is an interpretive perspective of regional patterns and themes that would bring coherence to the history of the Jews in the American West.

Jewish Life in llie American West seeks to offer such a perspective. Its five essays about migration and settlement, popular culture, merchant networks, Jewish women, and community building in urban and rural settings from the 185Os to the 1920s form the companion volume to a photographic exhibit funded by the Autry Museum of Western History and designed to show the West in its diversity and devoid of myth. The book, which is beautifully laid out and crafted, intends both to reach a broad audience and to chart new interpretive paths for scholars. Particularly important is Hasia Diner's thought-provoking essay, which sets New York City and the American West as geographic and psychic poles that represent the conflicting desires of Jews for assimilation and ethnic and religious authenticity. Similarly, William Toll's piece on merchants uncovers a regional network bound by economic, religious, social, and kinship ties that fostered Jewish community in the West. Yet, these merchants were not insular and tribal. Their activities made Jews critical to the peopling and development of the region. Once established, they emerged from their wholesale and retail houses to provide civic leadership to scores of western towns and cities. Other essays hint at regional themes and offer valuable insights, but like the traditional historiography are narrowly focused. Biographies of selected Jewish women and farmers ignore questions of representativeness, and without context appear idiosyncratic. For example, statements about spectacular Jewish geographical mobility should have been weighed against the vast literature on mobility that reveals a people frequently on the move not only in the West but throughout nineteenth-century America. The book is Pacific Coast-centric, which is understandable because of the large concentration of Jews in that sub region. Still, it would have been interesting if concepts about community, migration, and settlement had been tested more thoroughly in the Southwest, Great Basin, and Great Plains. This short book would also have benefited by being more inclusive through solicitation of essays on Jewish religious figures and organizations, laborers, politicians, and movie moguls. Left unexplored is the Jewish encounter with prejudice and discrimination in the West.

The foundation stones of Jewish history in the West have already been laid. There are scores of biographies of individuals, farm colonies, and communities. State histories are also available. Jewish Life in the West takes the next step in reordering the priorities of historians of the Jewish experience in America west of the Mississippi River. This book pioneers a level of analysis that sheds light on regional patterns of western Jewry. Only when this task is accomplished will the story of Jews in America be complete.

ROBERT ALAN GOLDBERG

University of Utah

Salt Lake City