Sid Gillman. Josh Katzowitz

      When the Jews first immigrated to Minneapolis, it was after the Civil War when whites had begun to spread to the Midwest and beyond in an attempt to develop the smaller towns and make them into strong, blue-collar cities. While St. Paul already had established two synagogues by 1878, only about 100 Jews lived in Minneapolis by 1880. The Jews came from Germany and were attracted by those industries the Anglo-Saxons had already begun to build. The unique immigrants began opening stores that sold clothes and other goods to the lumberjacks and workers around the area.

      By 1900, the Jewish population had grown to 6,000, and a decade later, it had more than doubled to 13,000. By the time World War I ended, farming around the area was an endangered career, the labor industry and sawmills were dying off, and the opening of the Panama Canal was negatively impacting the Midwest’s railroad industry. As a result, the unemployed infiltrated Minneapolis and St. Paul, looking for work. And they were angry.

      Minneapolis’s culture of anti-Semitism became a real problem with the influx of unemployed citizens (though, curiously, the citizens of St. Paul were much more tolerant). Religious leaders invoked hateful language when referencing Jews, and those in the community forbid them from taking part in civic and social organizations—that meant no entry into the Kiwanis Club, the Rotary Club, or Toastmasters International. They couldn’t buy houses. They couldn’t take certain jobs.

      “The telephone companies, the banks, they never hired a Jew in their lives,” said Budd Guttman, a first cousin of Gillman’s who was about a decade younger and grew up in Minneapolis idolizing him. “You couldn’t sell your house to a Jew. That was in the real estate guides.”

      Writes Laura E. Webb in a 1991 edition of Minnesota History magazine: “The post–World War I years were marked by a continuation of the 100 percent Americanism brought on by the war, but without an external enemy, these xenophobic feelings were directed inward at recent immigrants and their families…. Historian John Higham wrote of this period: ‘The Jews faced a sustained agitation that singled them out from the other new immigrant groups blanketed by racial nativism—an agitation that reckoned them the most dangerous force undermining the nation.’”

      Jewish gangsters in Minneapolis during the 1920s didn’t help their standing in the community either, especially when people read in the newspaper rags that gangsters like Isadore “Kidd Cann” Blumenfeld and Mose Barnett had been linked to the police department and the mayor in a sleazy web of corruption and crime. The editor of the Saturday Press, Jay Near, went on the attack in 1929, writing, “I simply state a fact when I say that 90 percent of the crimes committed against society in this city are committed by Jew gangsters … It is Jew, Jew, Jew, as long as one cares to comb over the records.” This was at a time when Jews made up less than 5 percent of the state’s population, making Near’s assertion a little hard to believe.

      That didn’t stop Near from getting even more vicious: “I have withdrawn allegiance to anything with a hook nose that eats herring. I have adopted the sparrow as my national bird … until [the Ku Klux Klan] hammers the eagles’ beak out straight.” At the time, Near was seen as extreme, but that doesn’t mean he was alone in his views, particularly when an area evangelist named Luke Radar spewed some of the same hateful rhetoric for a quarter-century and gathered a rather large following.

      Guttman remembers the anti-Semitism well. He remembers racing down the alleys between houses after school because if his xenophobic schoolmates caught him, they’d give him a beating. That’s why he learned to box in seventh grade, so he could teach his peers some respect and so that his legs wouldn’t have to carry him so fast if he found trouble. Boxing for Guttman was a necessity, and Gillman surely felt the sting of discrimination as well.

      “Growing up,” Guttman said, “I thought my middle name was Kike.”

      The intolerance in Minneapolis lasted until the late 1940s, but the winds began to shift after an article by Carey McWilliams in Common Ground magazine shamed the city. McWilliams wrote there was an “iron curtain” that separated the Jews and the Gentiles, and he declared Minneapolis the U.S. capital of anti-Semitism.

      “It was a blow to the city’s solar plexus,” said Hyman Berman, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Minnesota.

      Mayor Hubert Humphrey, who went on to serve as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president before losing the presidency to Richard Nixon in 1968, appointed a special commission to investigate the citywide discrimination, and he eventually used that successful paradigm shift to fuel the rest of his political career.

      But that was many years in the future. Many years after Sid and Esther had left the city. For them, the idea that Jews were lower than the dirt that good, native Minnesotans walked on was still prevalent. For them, the idea of a Jew buying a house or giving him a job was downright offensive. “I did have aspirations,” Esther said. “I wanted to be a schoolteacher very badly. I remember discussing this with my senior high school counselor. She said, “You know, Esther. With you being Jewish, they’re not going to hire you in Minneapolis. Do you want to go to a small town?’ She sort of talked me out of it.”

      After high school, she got a job with an insurance company as a receptionist and took night classes at the University of Minneapolis, declaring a psychology major. But she never finished her degree. And she never got to be a schoolteacher. Neither Sid nor Esther would ever really break away from the anti-Semitic culture of the Midwest. It followed them, haunted them, and changed the track of their careers. But it also helped shape their personalities and the way they treated others. They learned—independently and collectively—to live with it. But, like Guttman, they also decided to fight back. They just landed their body blows without having to strap on boxing gloves.

      “Sid was the first kid that left the Jewish ghetto and became well known,” Guttman said. “He was our hero. He was our Jackie Robinson.”