American and British Jews in the Age of Great Migration

The massive migration of more than two million Jews to Western Europe and the United States between the 1880s and the enactment of restrictive laws after the First World War fundamentally changed the worldwide distribution of the Jewish people. Lloyd Gartner has made many seminal insights into this migration to Britain and the United States, including its East European background. They are widely used to illuminate the varieties and destinations of this great movement and a broad selection of Gartner's accessible, major studies is presented here. Professor Gartner emphasizes the cultural and economic transformation of the masses of immigrants, and deals frankly with some of their social problems. His studies pay attention to the religious behaviour of the immigrants, which ranged from zeal to maintain traditions in full, to indifference and even negative attitudes. An important place is taken by the sensitive, often difficult, relations between the immigrants and the established Jewish communities of their adopted countries. This book is written in a clear and vigorous style that is easy and interesting to read. It portrays the life experiences of the immigrants themselves, often in their own words, which the author knows from many family histories. The book draws its materials from immigrant language-especially Yiddish but also Hebrew, and from Government documents and the general Jewish Press.