Center For The Study Of Democratic Institutions.

Rischin paints a vivid picture of Jewish life in New York at the turn of the century. Here are the old neighborhoods and crowded tenements, the Rester Street markets, the sweatshops, the birth of Yiddish theatre in America, and the founding of important Jewish newspapers and labor movements. The book describes, too, the city's response to this great influx of immigrants--a response that marked the beginning of a new concept of social responsibility.

The nation's thirty-first state emerged early as one of its most diverse as people immigrated to the west. California's indigenous tribes were forced off their lands first by Spanish settlers, then by the arrival of gold miners from every corner of the world. Because of its Catholic missionary history, Gold Rush California did not experience a more exclusive eastern-style Protestantism. This permitted more rapid and inclusive acculturation. California Jews, unlike their eastern counterparts whose arrival often followed that of European Protestants, were often among the first settlers to establish a west coast community.
Jewish immigrants to California took advantage of its physical environment, ethnic diversity, and cultural distinctiveness to fashion a form of Judaism unique in the American experience. California Jews enjoyed unprecedented access to political power a generation earlier than their New York counterparts. They thrived in the multicultural mix, redefining the classic black-white racial binary by forging relations with a variety of religious and ethnic groups in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

First published in 1902, and illustrated by Jacob Epstein, this evocation of the spiritual and cultural life of Yiddish New York remains fresh and relevant, and an invaluable commentary on one aspect of the formation of modern America. To an extent unequaled by any outsider before him, Hutchins Hapgood, a descendant of generations of New England Yankees, succeeded in penetrating the inner life of an American immigrant community. Hapgood did not set out to reform and cleanse the ghetto. His aim was to understand and interpret it, to find and know its poets, scholars, dramatists, actors, and artists, as well as its merchants and businessmen. He presents real people, individually identified and described, working out their destiny as part of a vital Jewish world. The sensibility and intentions of this book, as the editor points out, "anticipated a period of unexampled American artistic and intellectual gusto and creativity." Moses Rischin's discerning and affectionate introduction places Hapgood's neglected classic squarely in the mainstream of American cultural development.