Jewish immigrant associations and American identity in New York, 1880-1939

How did the vast number of Jewish immigrants from different regions of Eastern Europe form their American ethnic identity? In his answer to this question, Daniel Soyer examines how Jewish immigrant hometown associations (landsmanshaftn) transformed old-world communal ties into vehicles for integration into American society. Focusing on New York - where some 3,000 associations enrolled nearly half a million members - this study is one of the first to explore the organizations' full range of activities, and to show how the newcomers exercised a high degree of agency in their growing identification with American society. The wide variety of landsmanshaftn - from politically radical and secular to Orthodox and from fraternal order to congregation - illustrates the diversity of influences on immigrant culture. But nearly all of these societies adopted the democratic benefits and practices that were seen as the most positive aspects of American civic culture. In contrast to the old-country hierarchical dispensers of charity, the newcomers' associations relied on mutual aid for medical care, income support, burial, and other traditional forms of self-help. During World War I, the landsman