Jewish Immigrants in Early 1900s America: A Visitor's Account

A PHOTO-ILLUSTRATED CELEBRATION OF JEWISH IMMIGRANT LIFE IN AMERICAFrom the 1880s to 1920s, more than two million Jews immigrated to the United States. Most were fleeing poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. As the U.S. Jewish population swelled from 250,000 to 4 million, Jews in America built new identities and strong communities for themselves.Midway through that wave of immigration, the author of this booklet — the noted French political writer Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, who had written extensively about anti-Semitism — toured U.S. Jewish communities to see how the refugees were doing. “I had already visited most of the Jewish quarters in Europe, Asia and Africa,” he explained in 1904. “It remained for me to acquaint myself with what Americans improperly refer to as the ‘ghettos’ of the New World.” What he saw in the northeastern United States impressed him tremendously.Back home in France, he gave an enthusiastic talk to the Jewish Studies Association in Paris, praising a “land of wonders and liberty” where throngs of long-oppressed Jews were thriving. Librairie Nouvelle published his lecture as a short book in 1905. This new English translation supplements the text with more than fifty photos and illustrations.This translation is the second book in the Between Wanderings collection.