Read Online When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman - Free Book Online

American Jewry to protect and defend it against pain and pity."
    What the men read sickened them. It stirred a bitter mix of guilt, shame, and anger. Whether American Jews deserved to take on this historical burden—the crisis of conscience that came with knowing they'd done very little while millions of their brethren were led to slaughter—is irrelevant. The point is that by the early 1960s, the seed of this feeling had taken root. And in the American Midwest, it found expression for the first time as an almost desperate need to help another community of European Jews who seemed to be facing, if not physical extinction, spiritual annihilation.
    In the nearly twenty years that had passed since the war's end, American Jews had emerged as the most well-off of the three large communities of Jews in the world. While the identity of Soviet Jews was being stifled and Israelis were still engaged in existential battles, American Jews were thriving. The security that Communism had deceptively offered an earlier generation and that Zionism had yet to deliver could be found in the United States. It was both exhilarating and lulling. Even though the sense of ease and comfort could be disturbed—as it was for Lou Rosenblum—by the uncomfortable awareness of the Holocaust, the vast majority of Jews had remained oblivious. They were too busy becoming Americans. Until the emptiness of their Jewish identity itself became a motivating factor for action, this community held tight to America's promise, the chance to forget where they had come from and the cousins they had left behind.
    By the early 1960s, American Jews represented something unique and unprecedented in American history: a minority group, only two generations removed from filthy, Lower East Side lives of impoverishment as garment workers and tenement dwellers, who had unequivocally and entirely made it. Multiple studies by local Jewish federations in the 1950s found that an overwhelming 75 to 96 percent of Jews held white-collar jobs. Compared with the American population overall, only 38 percent of whom were middle class, this represented a triumph. Even in New York City, the last enclave of poor Jews, two-thirds of the Jewish residents worked in professional or semiprofessional sectors. The factories where the grandfathers of Jewish doctors and lawyers had once toiled were now filled with blacks and Puerto Ricans.
    With prosperity came social and geographic shifts. For one thing, as the fifties came to a close, the suburbanization of the American Jew was almost complete. Between 1948 and 1958, twelve million Americans left large cities and set down roots in suburbia, and many Jews were among them. In New York City, which had a Jewish population of two million in the late 1950s, geography told the story—the first generation, at the turn of the century, lived in the slums of the Lower East Side; the second generation in the lower-middle-class outskirts of Brooklyn and the Bronx; and the third in the firmly middle-middle-class neighborhoods of Queens, Long Island, and Westchester County. In 1923, only fifty thousand Jews lived in Queens, but by 1957 that number had increased to four hundred and fifty thousand. Similar self-imposed middle-class Jewish ghettos popped up outside other major cities: in Brookline, near Boston; Shaker Heights, near Cleveland; and Highland Park, near Chicago.
    These new suburban Jews were comfortable in America. And not just because of affluence or the safe communities they created but because America seemed finally to accept and embrace them. They were normalized. They edged closer to being seen simply as "white people." The American Jewish Committee conducted a poll asking Gentiles if there were "any nationality, religious or racial groups" in the country that posed a threat to America. The results were unpublished but telling. In 1946, 18 percent of those polled named Jews as a threat. In 1954, that number was down to 1 percent. In the first