New York Jews and Great Depression

New York Jews and Great Depression
Author: Beth S. Wenger
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1999-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815606178

Chronicling the experience of New York City's Jewish families during the Great Depression, this work tells the story of a generation of immigrants and their children as they faced an uncertain future in America.

New York Jews and the Great Depression

New York Jews and the Great Depression
Author: Beth S. Wenger
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300062656

Challenging the standard narrative of American Jewish upward mobility, Wenger shows that Jews of the era not only worried about financial stability and their security as a minority group but also questioned the usefulness of their educational endeavors and the ability of their communal institutions to survive.

Jewish New York

Jewish New York
Author: Deborah Dash Moore
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 510
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479802646

The definitive history of Jews in New York and how they transformed the city Jewish New York reveals the multifaceted world of one of the city’s most important ethnic and religious groups. Jewish immigrants changed New York. They built its clothing industry and constructed huge swaths of apartment buildings. New York Jews helped to make the city the center of the nation’s publishing industry and shaped popular culture in music, theater, and the arts. With a strong sense of social justice, a dedication to civil rights and civil liberties, and a belief in the duty of government to provide social welfare for all its citizens, New York Jews influenced the city, state, and nation with a new wave of social activism. In turn, New York transformed Judaism and stimulated religious pluralism, Jewish denominationalism, and contemporary feminism. The city’s neighborhoods hosted unbelievably diverse types of Jews, from Communists to Hasidim. Jewish New York not only describes Jews’ many positive influences on New York, but also exposes their struggles with poverty and anti-Semitism. These injustices reinforced an exemplary commitment to remaking New York into a model multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious world city. Based on the acclaimed multi-volume set City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York winner of the National Jewish Book Council 2012 Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award, Jewish New York spans three centuries, tracing the earliest arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam to the recent immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

New York City in the Great Depression

New York City in the Great Depression
Author: Dorothy Laager Miller
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780738565972

Following the stock market crash of 1929, the rising unemployment rate and widespread depression made it necessary for the city of New York to provide more commodious quarters for the city's homeless. New York City in the Great Depression: Sheltering the Homeless is a pictorial history of the shelters provided by the city during the Great Depression, including the Municipal Lodging House and its annexes in Manhattan, the farm colony at Camp LaGuardia, and the rehabilitation center at Hart Island. Archival photographs and documents depict the famous Great Depression breadlines, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Gov. Al Smith, and Tammany Hall, as well as the city's immigrants and tenement housing.

The Homeless Transient in the Great Depression

The Homeless Transient in the Great Depression
Author: Joan M. Crouse
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1986-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438400101

Years before the Dust Bowl exodus raised America's conscience to the plight of its migratory citzenry, an estimated one to two million homeless, unemployed Americans were traversing the country, searching for permanent community. Often mistaken for bums, tramps, hoboes or migratory laborers, these transients were a new breed of educated, highly employable men and women uprooted from their middle- and working-class homes by an unprecedented economic crisis. The Homeless Transient in the Great Depression investigates this population and the problems they faced in an America caught between a poor law past and a social welfare future. The story of the transient is told from the perspective of the federal, state, and local governments, and from the viewpoint of the social worker, the community, and the transient. In narrowing the focus of the study from the national to the state level, Joan Crouse offers a close and sensitive examination of each. The choice of New York as a focal point provides an important balance to previous literature on migrancy by shifting attention from the Southwest to the Northeast and from a preoccupation with rejection on the federal level to the concerted effort of the state to deal with the non-resident poor in a humane yet fiscally responsible manner.

Neighbors in Conflict

Neighbors in Conflict
Author: Ronald H. Bayor
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421431025

Originally published in 1978. Millions of immigrants seeking a better life came to New York City in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ronald H. Bayor's study details how the relative tranquility among the city's four major ethnic groups was disturbed by economic depression, political divisions arising out of ties with the Old Country, and factional strife stirred up by local politicians seeking ethnic votes. Also evaluated are the effects of such emotional and political issues such as Nazism and Fascism upon the allegiances of Germans and Italians; the rift in the ethnic community caused by the communist scare; and the influence of such figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Father Charles Coughlin, and Fiorello La Guardia.

"Our Crowd"

Author: Stephen Birmingham
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1504026284

The #1 New York Times bestseller that traces the rise of the Guggenheims, the Goldmans, and other families from immigrant poverty to social prominence. They immigrated to America from Germany in the nineteenth century with names like Loeb, Sachs, Seligman, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. From tenements on the Lower East Side to Park Avenue mansions, this handful of Jewish families turned small businesses into imposing enterprises and amassed spectacular fortunes. But despite possessing breathtaking wealth that rivaled the Astors and Rockefellers, they were barred by the gentile establishment from the lofty realm of “the 400,” a register of New York’s most elite, because of their religion and humble backgrounds. In response, they created their own elite “100,” a privileged society as opulent and exclusive as the one that had refused them entry. “Our Crowd” is the fascinating story of this rarefied society. Based on letters, documents, diary entries, and intimate personal remembrances of family lore by members of these most illustrious clans, it is an engrossing portrait of upper-class Jewish life over two centuries; a riveting story of the bankers, brokers, financiers, philanthropists, and business tycoons who started with nothing and turned their family names into American institutions.

FDR and the Jews

FDR and the Jews
Author: Richard Breitman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2013-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674073673

Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, a contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler's Europe. Defenders claim that FDR saved millions of potential victims by defeating Nazi Germany. Others revile him as morally indifferent and indict him for keeping America's gates closed to Jewish refugees and failing to bomb Auschwitz's gas chambers. In an extensive examination of this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor bystander. In FDR and the Jews, they draw upon many new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a consummate politician-compassionate but also pragmatic-struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions. For most of his presidency Roosevelt indeed did little to aid the imperiled Jews of Europe. He put domestic policy priorities ahead of helping Jews and deferred to others' fears of an anti-Semitic backlash. Yet he also acted decisively at times to rescue Jews, often withstanding contrary pressures from his advisers and the American public. Even Jewish citizens who petitioned the president could not agree on how best to aid their co-religionists abroad. Though his actions may seem inadequate in retrospect, the authors bring to light a concerned leader whose efforts on behalf of Jews were far greater than those of any other world figure. His moral position was tempered by the political realities of depression and war, a conflict all too familiar to American politicians in the twenty-first century.