Viewing the Jewish Masses

Abstract

This essay aims to contrast two sets of critics who fixed their gaze on the influx of East European Jewry westward from the 1880s to the 1920s. The first couple juxtaposes the ‘Chicago School’ sociologist Louis Wirth (1897–1952) with the political economist Isaac Hourwich (1860–1924).¹ The second pair consists of two non-Jewish photo-journalist ‘reformers’: Danish-born Jacob Riis (1849–1914) and Wisconsin-born Lewis Hine (1874–1940).² Given the myth and reality of America’s ‘open door’ to immigrants until 1924, it is little wonder that interpretative models of acculturation in the early twentieth century included sympathetic treatments of Jews. Nevertheless the dominant paradigms in academic, bureaucratic and visual discourse displayed disdain for Jewish life, and especially for Yiddish culture. Both Jewish and non-Jewish critics nurtured this prejudice. I believe that the two commentators who played the larger roles in interpreting the legacy of immigrant Jewry in North America, i.e. Jacob Riis and Louis Wirth, were not nearly as sagacious as their contemporaries — Lewis Hine and Isaac Hourwich — who were neither as celebrated nor as frequently cited. Hine’s reputation, however, seems to be climbing,³ while Hourwich remains obscure, despite the republication in the last decades of his major work. All these individuals may be grouped together on the basis of their shared, self-conscious attempt to effect the transition of the Jewish immigrant generation along the lines of progress, modernization, and Americanization.