"The Rest of Us" Quotes

“A broken heart is better than a whole one where love has never crept in.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“Stuyvesant High School. In an English class, his teacher had been discussing The Merchant of Venice, and had held up the character of Shylock as “typical” of Jewish cruelty and greed. David Sarnoff had protested this interpretation, and had been hauled into the principal’s office for disrupting the classroom. The”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“To the disinterested outside visitor, the Lower East Side in the early 1900s would have appeared utterly chaotic, and nothing been foreseen to come out of it except disaster—or, at the very least, some sort of violent social upheaval or revolution. And yet that is not what happened at all. Instead, out of it came artists, writers, lawyers, politicians, entertainers, and businessmen, like Irving Berlin, Jacob Javits, Samuel Goldwyn, David Sarnoff,”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“Some East Side Jews were budding Marxists, some were socialists, some were Zionists. Some were Orthodox, some were atheists. The Jews of Warsaw could not see eye to eye with those from Krakow.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“They were feisty, fractious, independent, argumentative—bickering shrilly and incessantly with one another. They seemed almost to wear a collective chip on the shoulder.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“At the same time, though poor, they seemed curiously proud.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“They looked poor, and yet they did not look abject, the way Americans tend to think poor people ought to look. The immigrant Jews from Eastern European lands conformed to no previous immigrant image. As a group, they were not beggars. There were no outstretched Jewish hands asking for alms.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“And yet, by 1906, nearly ninety thousand Jews were arriving in New York City every year, most of them from Russia and Poland. (Because the Russians and the Poles seemed indistinguishable, all these immigrants were grouped as “Russians.”) Now the Jewish population of the city stood at close to a million, or roughly twenty-five percent of the total population, and by 1915 there would be nearly a million and a half, or twenty-eight percent. In sheer”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“The German Jews, in other words, were assimilationists only up to a point, and had prudently not tried to push beyond that point. It might be added, too, that many of the German Jews were blond, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed. In appearance, they did not stand out against the prevailing look”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“In 1870, the number of Jews in New York City had been estimated at eighty thousand, or less than nine percent of the city’s population. With”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“In fact, inside the new Reform temples, with their pulpits and pews and chandeliers, where hatted women worshiped alongside unhatted men and not in separate curtained galleries, the atmosphere was often indistinguishable from that of an American Christian church. The strictly Orthodox, kosher-keeping Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Hungarians viewed all these developments as examples—sinister and shocking ones—of how quickly the faith could erode in”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“day of worship was shifted from Saturday to Sunday, to conform with the religious habits of the American majority. The use of Hebrew was virtually dropped from the order of service, in favor of English. Keeping kosher households was deemed both archaic and impractical—as well as un-American. (The great American leader of the Reform movement, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, had shocked the Jews of Cincinnati by putting on a banquet at which shrimp and crawfish were among the delicacies”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“its seeds in Germany, but had come into full flower in the United States, where it was regarded—by the German-American Jews, at least—as an essential step toward assimilation into the American culture. Reform Judaism was touted as “the dominion of reason over blind and bigoted faith,” but it really represented the new dominion of America over the Old World. Among the revisions advocated by Reform was that houses of worship no longer be called synagogues, but instead be known as temples.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“As early as 1845, thirty-three young German-Jewish immigrants who had arrived in Manhattan just a few years before banded together to establish a Reform congregation, which they named Emanu-El. The very term “Reform,” of course, indicated that these Germans felt that there was something about traditional Judaism that needed updating and correcting. Reform”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“Meanwhile, from the trickle of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe—Russia, Poland, Rumania, Austria-Hungary—that had begun in 1881, there had grown a flood. By 1906, nearly two million Jews—roughly a third of the Jews of Eastern Europe—had left their homes. Over ninety percent of these had come to the United States, and most of them had”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews