American Jewish History

Historians of the early American West know well that the Jewish minority often played outsized roles in the region's birth, particularly in commerce and politics. Isaac Friedlander, California's "grain king," dominated the prodigious trade out of the central valley that fed markets from China to Liverpool. Adolph Gluck of the iconic cattle town of Dodge City was one of a long list of Jewish mayors across the West, and San Francisco's Abe Ruef was a poster child for corrupt political bosses of the day. Others show up in unexpected places. The merchant Solomon Bibo gained such trust among the people of New Mexico's Acoma pueblo that they [End Page 694] chose him as their governor. There were Jewish agrarian colonies on the Great Plains. One even had a synagogue made of sod.

This fine collection of essays both builds on and complicates that well-rooted theme. In doing so, it gives us a range of case studies of "relational identity"—of how who we are depends considerably on where and when we are and on whom we live near. That likely holds true of anybody anywhere, but when the particulars involve Jews and the evolving American West, the point is both starkly obvious and full of fascinating insights.

The nine essays fall neatly into three groups of three. The first affirms that Jews were widely accepted in the opening North American West but on the presumption that they play their parts, in complicated ways, in establishing a racial, ethnic and economic order that situated others under them. Lynne Marks and Jordan Stanger-Ross make the point by tracking how Jewish insiders in Victoria, British Columbia, added their voices to the denigration of African-Americans and Asian immigrants, but relations with Native peoples were messier. Merchants of Indigenous artifacts and curios validated Native peoples' humanity and culture while simultaneously affirming their subordination to their White patrons in the growing settler community. Far to the south along the border with Mexico, as Maxwell Greenberg shows through the prospering lives of two entrepreneurs, Jews did their part in constructing a racial order of labor for the booming copper mines of Arizona, this time with Hispanics at the bottom, while both abetting and benefiting from systems of policing along the porous international boundary.

Ellen Eisenberg, editor of the volume, builds on her monograph that stressed how Oregonian Jews were, if anything, more widely accepted in hierarchies of power than their neighbors to the north in Victoria. Perhaps for that reason they were notably absent from the racial denigration of others. Indeed, as the century turned, and as wider events changed the demographics and social climate, Oregon Jews began to identify with marginalized groups in the Pacific Northwest.

Eisenberg's essay is a natural segue to the second trio of essays. As the first half of the twentieth century saw the number and portion of Jews grow dramatically both in the West and nationally, so did the level of antisemitism. With that, Jews' self-perceptions moved toward the social margins, which had them increasingly identifying with the very groups they had previously helped push toward the lower rungs of power and respect. The shift took various forms. Caroline Luce's essay traces Jewish support for labor in the Young Communist League of Los Angeles. Their agitation in support of mostly Mexican migrant workers triggered increasingly ugly responses from authorities—the sort of racial and economic policing others had earlier taken advantage of in the Southwest. [End Page 695]

Genevieve Carpio's essay on David Marcus, an underappreciated attorney in Orange County, California, shifts the same theme's focus to the courtroom. Fresh out of law school, Marcus first worked for the Mexican consulate and became increasingly (and intimately through marriage) involved in the Mexican-American community. During a half century career that aligned him ever more steadily with the legal left, Marcus maneuvered brilliantly as an advocate for civil rights, work culminating in the 1947...