In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
and were fully devoted to the observance and maintenance of the laws of kashrut, the Jewish calendar and Jewish rituals. Moreover, Jewish women seem to have persisted in ritual observance even after their husbands had abandoned these practices (1991: 69–84). Hyman further observes that “this gendered difference in religious behavior was by no means limited to the European scene in the second half of the nineteenth century.” This trend could also be observed among “second-and third-generation Jewish families of Central European origin in America” (1997: 24) in the twentieth century. More recent sociological studies also seem to support the expectations that American Jewish women will express stronger Jewish religious identities than men, and stronger attachment to the Jewish people than men (cf. Fishman and Parmer, 2008; Hartman and Hartman, 2009).
The Jews, who emigrated to America from Eastern Europe during the third wave of Jewish immigration, set up vibrant communities with social services and Yiddish culture, which helped to build a bridge between immigrants and native-born American Jews. Socialism and Zionism, the secular ideologies brought by many of the emigrants from Eastern Europe led to new disagreements within the Jewish communities, yet they also provided new theories and programs that “transcended ghetto parochialism,” to borrow Goren’s expression (1980: 583), and invigorated Yiddish culture, making it more responsive to immigrants’ needs.
Immigrant Jewish women of the third wave, in particular, found that their new lives in America were directly influenced by the economic, social, and cultural factors of their migration. On the one hand, they enjoyed more freedom and autonomy in comparison with other groups of immigrant women, but on the other hand many Jewish women felt constricted by the economic circumstances in America. Moreover, American perception of success also limited Jewish women’s aspirations in America. According to this middle-class understanding of success, married women were not supposed to get engaged in paid work if they wanted to ←28 | 29→be regarded as appropriately feminine. It was their husbands’ responsibility to support the family financially. Because of this, the majority of Eastern European immigrant Jewish women who wished to make the most of their leisure time by seeking meaningful work, committed themselves to volunteer social work. Similarly to an earlier generation of Jewish women, they also founded a number of local organizations, such as day nurseries, maternity hospitals and old-age homes, in the hope of providing tzedakah (charity) to America’s Jewish poor and improving the lives of present and future generations of Jewish women.
The fourth wave of immigration, consisting of some 400,000 Jews,8 began in the 1930s prior to World War II and resumed again after 1945, intersected by the war. The pre-war group, escaping from Hitler’s dominance as it spread across Europe, consisted mostly of German Orthodox refugees who escaped the Third Reich in the 1930s or those who fled German-occupied countries and arrived in the United States before 1945. The post-war immigrants, on the other hand, were Jewish Holocaust survivors, who hoped to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the war, having been granted refuge in the United States. In subsequent decades, the Holocaust population expanded as Jews from Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and former republics of the Soviet Union emigrated to the United States as well.
Both pre-war and post-war groups included Ultra-Orthodox Jews who were part of the pre-war yeshiva worlds of Poland and Hungary as well as Hasidic Jews, representatives of some of the great Hasidic dynasties of Eastern Europe. However, the total number of European Ultra-Orthodox Jews who emigrated to the United States in this period was relatively small. This is due to the fact that before World War II, Jews in Europe were actively discouraged by Orthodox rabbis and Hasidic rebbes to emigrate to America which they considered an unholy land, a place where strict observance of the Halakhah would be endangered by the open society. Those who eventually reached America were the surviving remnants of the destruction of European Jewry (see also Section 1.2.4.1 in this chapter). In addition to the relatively small number of Haredim who managed to escape or survive the war, the immigrant population of the fourth wave also included Modern Orthodox and liberal Jews. Among the refugees of the fourth wave were distinguished Jewish scholars, teachers and charismatic leaders who made a large impact ←29 | 30→on all the major movements within Judaism over the next several decades. Each of the groups along the Orthodox spectrum, in turn, contributed to an increase in membership among Orthodoxy, which had suffered severe depletion in the process of Americanization of previous waves of Jewish immigrants (cf. Greenberg, 2006: 556; Prell, 2008: 124–126; Caplan, 2008: 179–182).
In the post-war period, American Jews began migrating to the suburbs and sunbelt cities in the southern and western United States. In unprecedented numbers, they left the East Coast and the Midwest and established new homes and communities in Florida, Texas, and California. Jewish prosperity in the post-war years, combined with the decline in racial and religious discrimination and the removal of educational and social barriers thanks to the implementation of the G.I. Bill in 1944, created new chances for the Jews of the post-war generation. In the second half of the twentieth century, Jews entered the law, medical and managerial professions in large numbers. Thanks to their efforts, the American Jewish community was “transformed from a community of struggling wage laborers and marginal traders into an educated, upwardly mobile, and creative section of the American middle class” (cf. Goren, 1980: 592–593; Karesh and Hurvitz, 2006: 538; Diner and Benderly, 2002: 273).
The most salient difference between the American and the European experience of Jews was the degree of anti-Semitism; in the United States, it was less significant than in Europe, and as Riv-Ellen Prell points out, “[…], anti-Semitism in the United States has, practically speaking, never been state sponsored, nor has the state sanctioned violence against Jews, [in contrast to Europe]” (2006: 589). Anti-Semitism has taken various forms in different periods and regions of the United States, ranging from a series of widely circulating negative stereotypes of Jews,9 through social discrimination, to examples of physical violence. Some scholars, such as for example Marc Lee Raphael (2003: 40) and William Pencak (2008: 11), report that a few incidents of anti-Jewish desecration or graffiti occurred during the colonial period, but there was very little violence until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hasia Diner and Beryl L. Benderly further observe that “[t];he prejudice, discrimination, and social isolation that plagued Jews in Europe found no place in the rough, fluid, democratic life on the frontier. People – at least white people – judged one another by individual character and behavior, not by religion or background” (2002: 84). Despite some incidences of anti-Semitism, such as the ←30 | 31→Leo Frank lynching in 1915, Henry Ford’s publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1920, anti-immigration quotas in the 1920s, as well as the pre-war pattern of social discrimination, American Jews have managed to feel economically, politically, and socially secure in the American society. As anti-Semitism declined during the post-war decades, the religion of American Jews gained widespread recognition as America’s ‘third faith’ alongside Protestantism and Catholicism. Apart from that, as Jonathan Sarna remarks, “[t]hanks to federal and state legislation, pressure from returning veterans, government and media exposure […], and the stigma of being compared to the Nazis, discrimination against Jews in employment, housing, and daily life also markedly declined” after World War II (2004: 275–276).10
All things considered, the United States has offered the Jews an extraordinary opportunity to live openly as Jews. Some have chosen to remain in more traditional venues, such as in Orthodox or Conservative communities, others have chosen to participate in new American Jewish movements such as Reconstructionist Judaism and Jewish Renewal, and still others have chosen to express themselves as Jews through Humanistic Judaism or only via volunteer social work. Such issues as Jewish identity, assimilation, accommodation, and intermarriage remain important topics of discussion within the American Jewish community nowadays.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, American Jews celebrate their place in the American society. They constitute a well-integrated body of American citizens who accepted the values and mores of the United States – and at the same time, to a large extent, achieved acceptance themselves – and entered the American public life with great energy and few inhibitions. Even though encountering barriers since their arrival in America, Jews have profoundly influenced American society and significantly shaped the American culture. Jews have had a major impact on American literature,