Stephen Birmingham, The Rest of Us. The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews by Ewa Morawska

Summary

The Rest of Us is Birmingham's third volume on American Jewish history, following The Grandees - about the earliest, Sephardic group (the first immigrants arrived in America in 1654), and Our Crowd - about the fortunes of the next wave, the Jews from Germany (who began coming in increasing numbers from the 1850s on). Devoted to the latest and largest of Jewish immigration to the United States, the book aims to depict ‘the rise of America's Eastern European Jews’ from the time of their arrival (Part I, The Beginnings, 7880- 7979), the period of collective socio-economic advance (Part II, Getting Out, 7920- 7950), up to the present (Part III, 7957-). To illustrate this century-long process of the ‘implantation’ of East European Jews into American economic, social, and cultural life, Birmingham presents sketches of the personalities and careers of a dozen or so prominent individuals in the fields of politics, business, fashion, music, news and communication media.

The book has a popular character, and is clearly addresssd to a mass audience rather than to academic readers. Written in an easy and lively style, and providing several interesting vignettes from the heroes’ various entrepreneurial ventures, their complicated relations with friends and foes, and the vicissitudes of their personal lives, it makes overall for entertaining reading. At times, though - too often, given that the book seeks to provide a historical synthesis - the narrative of particular events becomes tediously drawn-out (for instance, an endless description, with several page-long transcripts from court hearings, of the 1919 trial of Rose Pastor Stokes, accused of Communist sympathies and un-American activities). It is also overloaded with trivia or even sensationalized gossip as, for example, parts of the chapters devoted to the personal and family lives of Sam Goldwyn, the Holywood tycoon, or Sam Bronfman, ‘the liquor king’, owner of Seagram's distilling company. An additional irritation is the chaotic presentation in some chapters, switching from theme to theme or person to person without apparent connections.

With these reservations, the portraits of the people Birmingham has chosen for his book are by and large skilfully and convincingly depicted, and his analysis of their personalities and careers contains many subtle psychological insights - in particular (a recurrent motif in the study), that of the uneasy ambivalence they must have felt toward their ‘Jewishness’ as well as the astonishing success they achieved in a short time.