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Narrated by Martha Teichner, the film follows the trajectory of Jewish American life from the earliest arrivals in the mid-17th century through the impact of the Nazi regime in World War II, the creation of Israel, and the new challenges of 21st century assimilation. Explore the personal stories many faced as they migrated to America, whether for economic opportunity or to escape persecution.
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00:32America, America, God shed his grace on me, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining.
01:08The story of Jewish migration to America begins some 400 years ago, in the 1650s, when small groups of Jews
01:19arrived, settling in what would become New York and Newport, Rhode Island.
01:25More Jews would trickle in over the decades to such places as Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina.
01:33They played roles in many parts of America's development.
01:38Some even fought in the American Revolution and the Civil War.
01:46In the mid-1800s, a larger migration of Jews arrived from German-speaking lands of Europe.
01:55Some 50,000 came during this period, settling in the Northeast and Midwest.
02:02Jews also went to California for the gold rush.
02:07Famous families such as the Strausses of Levi Strauss, the Oxes and Salzburgers of the New York Times, and the
02:16Guggenheims had their origins in this wave of Jewish immigration to the United States.
02:23As the 19th century went on, more and more Jews came to America, but even as late as the 1870s,
02:31their numbers were moderate, at just more than 200,000.
02:38That would dramatically change, as millions of Jews would soon call America home.
02:53By the 19th century, the vast majority of Jews in the world were in what we call Eastern Europe and
03:00Russia.
03:02They are able to establish communities that exist for long periods of time, for centuries upon centuries.
03:11The idea of living in the same place where your father lived, where your grandmother lived, where your great-grandmother
03:17lived,
03:17living in the same village, the same town, the same city, is truly anomalous.
03:34Eastern Europe and Russia were the lands that gave birth to the language, literature, and culture of Yiddish.
03:42They were lands of peddlers, tailors, and craftsmen, of religious and political expression, of the Jewish schools known as cheders,
03:59taught by melameds.
04:01They were lands of intellectuals, artists, writers, and revolutionaries, where Jews lived in villages, small towns known as shtetls, and
04:16big cities.
04:19Few Jews were wealthy. Most were just getting by. And some, of course, were very poor.
04:29Anti-Semitism was always there. But despite it all, the Jews here considered this home.
04:40My father, he was one of 13. Only seven survived. And the other kids went to cheder, and they had
04:47the usual story about the cheder and the melamed with the leather belt.
04:54But my father didn't go to the cheder. He went to the gymnasium. He was from a town called Ushica.
05:02And the Jews. And the Jews were estate managers for Polish landlords. See, the landlords owned it. And so he
05:11was caught between the Poles and the peasants.
05:16And it was difficult, but he was not the usual shtetl Jew.
05:29My grandmother was supposed to have been the best cook in town. Every holiday, even the matzos that we ate,
05:37were all baked in our house by my grandmother.
05:41It was fresh, everything for breakfast, with a cake. It was a life that you couldn't believe.
05:52I romanticize it to some degree as well. But when my mother talks about it, she talks about some of
05:57the hard parts, too.
05:59My grandfather was so poor, he sent it to work, because it was one less mouth to feed.
06:05They had seven, eight kids. And she went to work at 14 in Warsaw.
06:12Be 14 years old and start working in various garment factories, which is what my mother did.
06:25The events which would bring about the mass immigration to America from Eastern Europe and Russia began in the late
06:331700s,
06:35when the Russian Empire expanded westward, bringing huge numbers of Eastern European Jews into its domain.
06:45Czarist Russia wants to expand into an empire, so it keeps on annexing more land.
06:49But it annexes land with people who aren't Russian Orthodox.
06:55Jews are not seen as part of Russia, because they're not Russian Orthodox.
07:00You don't get to choose. You are born and registered in a religious community.
07:04You are born as a Jew. You are born as a Russian Orthodox.
07:07The decision by the Russian Tsars was to confine nearly three-quarters of the Jews of these new Russian territories,
07:18approximately a million people, to a specific area known as the Pale of Settlement.
07:26What they could have said was, get out of here, we don't want you.
07:29One of the Tsarinas said, Jews are not permitted in the lands of Christ.
07:33That could have been an option. Instead of that option, they said, look, we're going to magnanimously,
07:38they used that phrase, allow you to remain in this territory where you've always lived.
07:50The population of Jews in Eastern Europe multiplied from around one million in 1800 to six million in 1900.
07:59That's a six-fold increase. That's an enormous increase.
08:03How are you going to feed that population? How are you going to house that population?
08:08How are you going to find work for that population?
08:12So over the next century, as the vast majority of Jews are still living in this territory,
08:20there is simply no way that they can survive.
08:24There's no, not because anybody's cutting their throats.
08:27There is this huge economic and social crisis that needs a solution.
08:37People start leaving, start migrating.
08:41A lot of non-Jews are migrating for the same reason.
08:49The Jewish migration to the United States is on some level a kind of continuous story.
08:53So the migration begins small in Bavaria and then it moves to encompass Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including
09:04Galicia.
09:05By the 1870s, it starts into the Tsarist Empire, first in Lithuania and then ultimately encompasses Ukraine and Southeastern Russian
09:17Empire.
09:17What's important is that as it moves east, the snowballing confronts larger and larger Jewish communities.
09:25So the Jews of Germany are a tiny community.
09:29But by the time it gets to Galicia, Lithuania, Ukraine, you're talking about millions and millions of people.
09:37For some Jews, the choice to leave Eastern Europe and Russia was to escape persecution and pogroms.
09:44For the overwhelming majority, however, the decision to leave came down to economic opportunity.
09:53They're leaving overwhelmingly because of economic circumstances.
09:58The idea that Jews came to America to flee pogroms, for example, is a kind of catchphrase, a cliché of
10:09American Jewish history.
10:10This literary mythology of a Cossack on a horse with a whip beating Jews and then the Jew flees to
10:18America is a literary construction.
10:21While the attraction to America was strong, many religious Jews saw things differently.
10:29Here were the parents telling their children, don't go to America, you'll stop being Jewish, you'll give up your traditions,
10:37you'll throw your tefillin away, your prayer shawls away, you'll stop keeping kosher, you'll stop keeping the Sabbath.
10:45To put it very bluntly, America was an impure land.
10:48It was impossible to remain religious in America.
10:52They talked about how in America, even the air is full of pork.
10:58There was this attitude in America, you can do whatever you want, you're free, you don't have to follow rules.
11:04This is the Wild West.
11:07You can be an outlaw.
11:09And it was intoxicating.
11:12So it wasn't freedom of religion, it was freedom from religion.
11:17And people were afraid of that.
11:19While many religious Jews chose to stay behind, others were too poor to afford the journey.
11:29It's an interesting historical irony that the most successful Jews never came.
11:37They had no reason to come to America because they were doing okay.
11:40But it was the poorer ones, although never the poorest, they were the ones who went to America.
11:49There was a mental shift in people's way of thinking.
11:54Why do we have to accept life as it's given to us?
11:56Why do we have to just do what our grandparents and great-grandparents had to put up with?
12:00We don't have to do that anymore.
12:01There's America.
12:03My great-great-grandparents never would have imagined that there were choices.
12:07There's fate.
12:08You're born into that situation.
12:09That's where you're going to live, that's where you're going to die.
12:15What do you do once you get the idea that you want to go to America?
12:18Your relative will send you money, and you have to then make your way from whatever little town you're in
12:26to the West where there are railroads that they could hop onto a railroad.
12:34It is illegal to leave the Russian Empire unless you have the proper papers.
12:38Most Jews do not have the proper papers.
12:42So many sneak over the border.
12:44It's called stole over the border.
12:46They didn't go during the day.
12:47They went at night, and then they would travel to the ports.
12:52In the early 1800s, there were no actual immigration boats to America.
12:59Instead, Jews purchased tickets to travel on sailing ships, transporting cargo, for a journey that could take up to three
13:09weeks.
13:12While some could afford tickets on the upper decks, the majority of immigrants traveled in the spaces between decks or
13:21at the bottom of the ship.
13:23This was known as steerage.
13:28Everyone is living there.
13:30It smells in a nauseating way.
13:32The ship, it moves all the time from side to side.
13:36It was just crowded, unpleasant.
13:39People were sick on the boat.
13:40And if you were sick, you were all sleeping together in one area.
13:44That's why many people would catch illnesses.
13:47If you were sick and you died on the boat, you would die, but then you would be thrown overboard.
13:56When it really has a huge bump, starting in the 1870s,
14:00is not surprisingly because we have the transition from sail to steam.
14:04The steamships carry enormous cargo of immigrants.
14:09And in fact, the immigrant trade by the 1870s and 1880s becomes big business.
14:14And so it's in all sorts of people's interest.
14:18The steamship companies, the rail companies, and also, by the way, the Americans,
14:23because they want white people to fill the continent, as it were, to fill the steerage with immigrants.
14:30And they almost don't care where they're coming from.
14:35I know a lot about that journey, directly from my mother.
14:39The boat she was on was called the Zeeland.
14:42It had four levels, three for the higher paying passengers, and the fourth level at the bottom of the boat,
14:51the steerage level, was for people like her.
14:55And they all slept in hammocks.
14:57The trouble is, when the sea got rough and people started throwing up,
15:02if you were on the lower hammock, you were in trouble, because it landed right on you.
15:08They would not have left if it wasn't awful.
15:11They left. They were in steerage, so clearly they weren't very rich.
15:15If I were them, in a not-so-great life, in a place that hated my people,
15:20I too would have taken whatever shackles I could pull together and jump under a boat and get to America.
15:27While the overwhelming majority of Jews came from Eastern Europe and Russia,
15:33a smaller number, some 50,000, came from Greece, Turkey, and Syria.
15:42The situation in those parts of the world was terrible.
15:45There were wars, there was poverty, there was discrimination,
15:49and more than anything else, there was a new dream, America.
15:53And suddenly, words came to the old world,
15:56you know what, in the United States, you can get jobs, you can make money,
16:00you can have family, you can go to school, you have opportunities, you don't have them here.
16:04And so a number of the young bachelors and young single women had the idea,
16:09why don't we try a new life?
16:11My grandmother, Romy, used to tell us, when she left and she said goodbye to her parents,
16:16and she knew then she would never see them again.
16:20And the parents said, you have to go to America because there's no future for you here.
16:24And the parents knew they would never see their children again.
16:29Those people were made out of material, you don't see that anymore.
16:32They were gutsy people.
16:35They were people who wanted to make the world a better place for themselves
16:38and do everything in their power to make it better for their children and for their grandchildren.
16:43It was awesome.
16:47My grandmother was born in America.
16:50So her mother came here.
16:52I never thought beyond her mother, my great-grandmother.
16:56And now I think about the generation before that.
17:00I think about my great-grandmother's parents who saw their daughter leave with her children from Warsaw to get to
17:10America.
17:11That's what I think about.
17:12And I think about how they had no idea that there would be any future for their family, for their
17:19bloodline, or for the Jewish people.
17:24No, I can't imagine what it must have felt like when you stood at that rail siding or you stood
17:31at that port and realized it was the last hug and the last kiss you would probably ever get.
17:41Maybe that was the way even the group that stayed kept faith with the future, is they offered their kids
17:47to go on that journey that they couldn't take.
17:56By 1920, some two and a half million Jews had come to America, each one with a story, arriving to
18:07face a new world and a new land, exhausted from travel, with a future that was entirely unknown.
18:26It's very scary. We tend to think it's so easy. They come and then they're workers in a sweatshop and
18:33then they own a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. It doesn't work that way.
18:36It's a horrible, dislocating experience to move to a place, to leave everything behind and move to a place where
18:48you don't know your way around, you don't know the language, you don't know the culture, and you don't have
18:54the moorings of traditional society.
18:58It was really a fending for yourself kind of situation in the earlier decades.
19:04Slowly there grew up these immigrant aid societies that began to provide services to the incoming immigrants in order to
19:13help them survive.
19:14And those serve as an enormous bulwark against this alienation.
19:22You get synagogues, you get loan societies, you get a whole network of agencies that are there to help you.
19:41Many of the first to arrive became peddlers, calling on connections from their old hometowns or the communities they'd found
19:50in the United States.
19:53Others worked in the garment industry, known then as the needle trades. Almost all of them would send money home
20:02to their families.
20:06Every letter that contains money is the biggest advertisement for America.
20:12It's not only that they're sending back money in their letters, but they're paying the fare of brother number one
20:19and then brother number two and then brother number three.
20:22And then they'll bring over sisters and they'll bring over cousins.
20:25And so they reconstitute pretty significant elements of their family.
20:33People were receiving letters from people who had already gone to New York, for example, or maybe they'd even gone
20:39to Milwaukee or they had gone to St. Louis.
20:40And these are relatives, these are neighbors, who took themselves to a photography studio, borrowed a set of clothes and
20:48a nice hat to put on, had a nice screen behind them, took a beautiful picture of them in America,
20:53sent it home.
20:53And so people thought, wow, they look great. They look like a prince. I'm going there.
20:59Little did they know that once the guy was done with his shoot at the photography studio, he would put
21:04on his regular old clothes and his rags and walk out.
21:08But that was a business.
21:09You wanted to tell the people back home that you were doing well.
21:14My great grandmother came penniless, illiterate, not knowing the language, to this country with eight children.
21:23My grandmother started working when she was four years old, doing work in the house of threading little Christmas cards
21:32to put on presents.
21:34And my other grandmother went to work in a tobacco factory when she was 12.
21:38On my dad's side, they got into textiles and dead people.
21:45They started a cemetery that's still thriving in New Jersey, still family run.
21:52They got into schmatas and dead people.
21:56Seems like two things that will never go out of style.
22:01My mother's father's mother, she came here and very quickly sized up that life in America was going to be
22:08different than life in Hungary.
22:11She separated from her husband.
22:14They got a divorce.
22:15She went into the real estate business for herself.
22:19If she could find a room to rent for 50 cents, she'd rent it.
22:23And then she'd go on the street and find someone who'd rent it for 75 cents.
22:27She'd take the 75 cents and find a 75 cent room.
22:30And then she'd be on the street looking for someone to rent it for a buck.
22:35My grandpa, Zede Gershon Leib, was very exploratory in how he thought of opportunity.
22:45He had a candy store.
22:47And it bored him.
22:49And all of a sudden, I don't know what he did to create this opportunity for himself.
22:57But around that period, there was a Baron de Hirsch fund.
23:02It was to give Jewish people the opportunity to be landowners.
23:08My Zede said, a farmer?
23:11I want to be a farmer.
23:13And he accepted land, about 25 acres.
23:20And Zede had a dairy farm, not a whole bunch of cows, 12, in Ulster County.
23:28I think they were the only Jews.
23:30But here was the strange thing that I could never answer.
23:36They had left Europe to a new land, new opportunity.
23:42And yet, when they settled in Ulster County, it was as if they were in Russia.
23:48The clothing was still the same.
23:51The language was Russian.
23:53The language was Yiddish.
23:55English wasn't heard.
23:57The only two English words that my grandfather knew was, nice girl.
24:02When he patted me on the head, he would say, nice girl.
24:11As more and more Jews came to America, they fanned out across the country, building synagogues, getting educations and jobs,
24:22starting businesses and creating communities.
24:30In the 1920s, things changed.
24:33A recession after World War I and the Red Scare led to a wave of xenophobia across the nation.
24:43In the public discourse and among politicians, Southern and Eastern European immigrants were considered ethnically inferior, a drag on the
24:54economy, unable to assimilate into American culture.
25:00What followed were a series of laws passed in 1924, which brought Jewish immigration to a near halt.
25:10Jews who had hoped to come to America saw the doors close.
25:16And American Jews, who'd planned to bring over extended families, could not.
25:271933 marked the rise of the Nazis, and soon after, severe persecution of Jews in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
25:41In 1939, World War II would begin, and Jews would be persecuted across Europe, forced into ghettos, and shipped to
25:51concentration camps.
25:54Despite frantic attempts by Jews in America to help Jews in Europe find refuge, the U.S. made few accommodations.
26:07In the end, the effect on American Jews was marginal, but for those seeking escape from Europe, it was a
26:16death sentence.
26:18During the war, by some estimates, fewer than 150,000 Jews were allowed into the United States, while some 6
26:29million were killed by the Nazis.
26:45Many consider this period to be the darkest chapter in America's immigration history.
26:57After the war, America continued many of its firm policies on immigration, allowing in only 150,000 more Jews.
27:16Can you imagine us?
27:18Okay, we went bananas.
27:20We're all so excited seeing the Statue of Liberty.
27:23This happened to be a beautiful day.
27:26You see Manhattan on one side, you see New Jersey on the other side, and we were on the Hudson
27:33River.
27:34It was just unbelievable.
27:36I remember getting off the boat, and I remember a car ride to our hotel.
27:41And I remember my mother not being quite happy because she thought she was coming to the city of Oz.
27:50She didn't use those words, but, you know, she thought it was going to be the Emerald City.
27:54And instead, she saw clotheslines hanging.
27:57I think they probably went through a tenement area.
27:59And she saw tenements, and she saw dilapidated buildings, and said, this is what I left Europe for.
28:05Holocaust survivors are always depicted as grim and gloomy.
28:10And they were that way at times.
28:12How could they not be?
28:15But my memories are of refugees getting together, telling stories of the old world, laughing a lot, having a schnapps.
28:26And they would talk and tell stories about the old world, about their families.
28:31And then I remember a lot of laughter.
28:36While the years following World War II brought much of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia to a close,
28:44the same period began a new chapter of Jews coming to America, this time from the Islamic world across the
28:53Middle East and North Africa.
28:55These were lands where Jews had lived for centuries.
29:05Jews settled in communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
29:09In some cases, for instance, in the case of Iraq, which is probably the oldest Jewish community in the Middle
29:15East,
29:16they were there for thousands of years since biblical times.
29:19It's difficult to generalize about the experience.
29:22It just really differed from place to place, from time to time.
29:26In Morocco, Yemen, Jews lived in relative security, but lived more simple, traditional lives.
29:33Sometimes in small rural hamlets with traditional professions as craftsmen, as peddlers.
29:40In some cases, notably Egypt and Iraq, Jews were very assimilated.
29:46They were integrated into government.
29:48They held positions of power.
29:49They were ministers.
29:50They were journalists.
29:51They were writers.
29:52They were musicians.
29:53They were filmmakers.
29:53Egypt and Iraq are often looked at as the most successful examples of Jewish integration into Arab society.
30:05Baghdad, through a child's eyes, was beautiful day trees.
30:11And I could see from the window the dates falling on the windowsill.
30:15And we used to sleep on the rooftops in Iraq.
30:20And I used to count the stars.
30:22The sky was clear.
30:23And my father was very superstitious.
30:26And he used to tell me, Sanuti, because that was my nickname.
30:29Stop counting stars.
30:30It's bad luck.
30:32When things were still good, the Jewish community used to take out the boat along the shores of the Tigris
30:39River at the crack of dawn when it's not too hot.
30:43And the river had a very distinct, delicious smell that I still can remember.
30:50I don't know what it is, but I think smell etches the memory.
30:56So, because I still can smell it.
30:58And it wasn't just a few years ago.
31:03There were, once upon a time, 80,000 Jews who lived in Egypt.
31:08And they were a part of every sphere of society.
31:13They were bankers.
31:14They were lawyers.
31:15They were even pashas.
31:17They'd been advisors to the kings.
31:19When you think about the years, the 1930s, the 1940s, when my own parents were coming of age in Cairo,
31:28and when so many Egyptian Jews were flourishing, that was precisely the time when, not so far away in Europe,
31:35Jews were experiencing horrific persecution, pogroms, attacks, ultimately the Holocaust.
31:41But here in Egypt, it had been relatively safe and embracing.
31:51It was a wonderful world to grow up in because it was totally multicultural, multinational, multilingual, multi-everything.
31:59How everybody tolerated everybody else.
32:03How everybody tolerated everybody else.
32:03I have no idea how they did it.
32:05There was no melting pot ideology.
32:09It was just that everybody happened to be living together.
32:11So you knew, among other things, what a church was like.
32:16My Christian friends knew what a temple was like.
32:19Everybody knew everybody else's language.
32:21So you spoke many languages, which was wonderful.
32:25We went to synagogue maybe three days a year, and we were not really a kosher family.
32:33For us, Judaism was a lot more about the culture, a lot more about the family values.
32:40My father spoke the Judeo-Persian dialect of Isfahan.
32:44My mother's family, that of Shiraz.
32:46And so it was much more of a cultural identity than a religious one.
32:52I mean, there were pockets of difficulty, pockets of antisemitism that have a deep root in Iranian culture.
32:59But it was possible to grow up and be sheltered from it.
33:06In the family, especially among my grandparents and my great aunts and uncles, they spoke Ladino.
33:13It was a language that was spoken by the Spanish Jews.
33:16And so, though they left Spain allegedly in 1492, they continued to speak their own kind of Spanish,
33:24which is the equivalent of, you know, the Yiddish for people who come from Eastern Europe and Germany.
33:31My grandmother used to call me Hermosura de Higico, means beautiful child of mine.
33:391948 marked a change for Jews across the Middle East with the creation of the State of Israel.
33:47While the new state was greeted with enormous enthusiasm, the countries in the Islamic world were enraged.
33:55And the Jews who lived in these lands began to see the decline and ultimately the decimation of many of
34:04their ancient communities.
34:07That is the moment when it seems as though it's no longer going to be possible for Jews to stay
34:14in their ancestral homes throughout the Middle East.
34:16In Iraq, for instance, almost overnight it seemed anti-Jewish legislation was passed, Jews were fired from civil service jobs.
34:24In most cases they had to forfeit their property.
34:27And so this entire group, they were essentially rendered destitute overnight, just lost their life's work.
34:33While many Jews left their homes in the Islamic lands after the creation of Israel, the exodus continued in the
34:41years and decades that followed,
34:43as Jews fled persecution, political upheaval, and sought economic freedom.
34:51I was playing hopscotch with my sister, who is two years older than me, outside.
34:56And two men passed by and said, you Jews, we will slaughter you soon.
35:02I remember my sister writing Israel.
35:06And I remember my father having such a fit.
35:10And he said, don't you ever, if you want a skill, then write that name.
35:14Don't you ever articulate it or write it ever again.
35:19You have to imagine Cairo as this very family-centric place.
35:24You lived near your loved ones.
35:26You lived near your relatives.
35:28You lived near your grandparents.
35:30And suddenly, almost overnight, it was over.
35:34Nasser decided that Egypt was only a country for Egyptians, and that we weren't Egyptians.
35:41Even though we lived there, even though I was born there, even though my father thought of himself as completely
35:481,000% an Egyptian.
35:53We had only the equivalent of a few dollars, and were forced to sign a piece of paper saying we
36:01were leaving, and we would never, never come back again.
36:05And that's what we did.
36:07And it was almost as if there was an erasure, an erasing of the life of the Jews of Egypt.
36:17Most of our pictures, we had burned even before we left, because if there was anybody on the picture that
36:24was in the past accused of being a spy, we would not want to be seen with them.
36:29We left dressed as Arab women.
36:34We were covered.
36:35My parents specifically told us not to speak, because we had a Judeo-Arabic accent.
36:42We were hoping to get over the border to Iran with the Jew-friendly Shah.
36:50A taxi driver came over to my father, and that taxi took us straight to the police station.
36:58Altogether, we were in different prisons about five to six weeks.
37:04Eventually, we did get a passport, and I do remember when that plane took off the Tamarack, that there was
37:11a sigh of relief, that we were free.
37:16That's one of the searing memories, being in the harbor in Alexandria, waiting and waiting for our ship to come
37:23so that we could board it.
37:27And pretty early in the voyage, my father, who I was sort of with, started screaming.
37:37And he would scream these sort of two Arabic words,
37:44which means, take us back to Egypt.
37:53The immigration from Iran came later, in 1979, as the Islamic Revolution arrived with its new leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
38:06Under his regime, many Jews were seen as loyalists to the Shah, or as Zionists.
38:13A mass exodus ensued, with thousands of Iranian Jews fleeing, many to the United States.
38:23My father got an anonymous phone call, telling him that it's time for him to pack up his family and
38:30leave, because he was a filthy Jew in the country who no longer had any room for Jews.
38:37That night, my mom came to my room, I'll never forget it, she was crying, and told me that I
38:44have to pack, because we're leaving tomorrow and I'm not allowed to call any of my friends to say goodbye.
38:49And that was the last time I was in Iran.
38:54Whether fleeing lands where they were no longer welcome, or seeking better lives, the Jews from the Middle East and
39:03North Africa all had to start anew, learn a new language, a new culture, and new way of life.
39:12But indeed, this has always been the story of America.
39:23I came to the States, and immediately I found a job as a mailboy at Lincoln Center.
39:29And I just realized that this is amazing.
39:33And I would speak to all these people.
39:35And so Leonard Bernstein I got to know, I got to know William Schumann, the composer.
39:40I mean, it was really amazing.
39:41And for three months I was a mailboy and loving New York.
39:45It helped me adapt here in the easiest possible manner.
39:51My mother had a job as a clerk in an office at a very elementary level.
39:57And my father worked as an employee.
39:59He had never been an employee in 40 years.
40:02So he felt very uncomfortable and very resentful.
40:05But they put up with it and they cobbled lives for themselves and invented some kind of way to continue
40:13being who they were without necessarily confronting the world outside of their apartment.
40:18My family ended up in this little remote part of New York called Bensonhurst.
40:26It was kind of an entire universe of other immigrant Jews.
40:32My family began, I think, deteriorating from the time we arrived.
40:40And, you know, that's what these memories make me look askance at the notion of the American dream.
40:46Because the American dream is not supposed to be about the dissolution of a family.
40:51But in my case, in our case, it happened so quickly.
40:57My sister was in America and what do young girls do in America?
41:00Well, they leave home.
41:02You don't do that in the Egyptian Jewish culture.
41:05You don't do that.
41:07So to the horror of my parents, she moved out.
41:11She left home.
41:13She didn't move very far.
41:14She moved to Queens.
41:15But she might as well have been light years away.
41:19My parents, I think, never made their peace with America.
41:23Certainly not my father.
41:28There was many, many years with everyone just heartbroken over the fact that we were a community in forced exile.
41:37Everybody wanted to make sure that you always told everyone that we're not here by choice.
41:43That we were kicked out of our country.
41:45We had no option but to come here.
41:48Parents were petrified of the value systems here.
41:53That their children were going to grow up without the strong family connection and the bond that assured their comfort
42:03at an older age.
42:06Despite the fact that most of our children will not be able to find jobs and may come back home
42:11after college,
42:13it is still a country where opportunity is at least perceived as present.
42:19In the rest of the world, it's not there.
42:21Certainly not in Egypt.
42:22The sense that the future is not closed and locked to you is very important.
42:29It's a very liberating feeling and I've always had it in America.
42:32Being here really provided the whole community with a tremendous amount of opportunity.
42:40You know, things that were not necessarily possible back in Iran.
42:44All of a sudden we came to a country where there were no limits.
42:49Some of the members of our community here have acquired a kind of business and financial success that they couldn't
42:58have possibly dreamt of in Iran.
43:01And others were able to educate themselves in a way that was probably not really possible for them back in
43:07Iran.
43:08And they've had the freedom to be Jewish.
43:10I mean, we are now, my generation is a generation who is unburdened with the concern of whether we can
43:18tell people we're Jewish or not.
43:20In the late 20th century, and now in the 21st, America has become home to many more Jews.
43:29Despite often restrictive U.S. immigration policies, these new immigrants have come from the Middle East, Asia, even as far
43:38as Ethiopia.
43:41In the late 1980s, more than 100,000 Jews immigrated from the collapsing Soviet Union.
43:49Today, America is home to nearly 7 million Jews who live throughout the country.
43:56The experience of the Jews in America is unprecedented in Jewish history.
44:01Nowhere in Jewish history, at no time in Jewish history have the Jews been so successfully economically, politically social.
44:10Have the Jews been so integrated into the society on all levels?
44:16I always felt America had been a haven for my parents.
44:20You know, they had come from a Europe where they were murdering Jews.
44:27They came here and didn't experience that.
44:30It really was a country that, maybe welcome isn't the right word, but certainly accommodated immigrants and understood them.
44:42Because everyone has an immigrant in their background.
44:47So there was always an understanding of the immigrant plight.
44:53My grandparents, they wanted us to speak English.
44:58They didn't want us to be old country.
44:59They wanted us to be successful American people.
45:02But at the same time, that their grandparents wanted us to be Americans.
45:07They wanted us to retain the loyalty to our traditions.
45:10But many have not, do not.
45:13The American power of assimilation is very, very strong.
45:17You have to remember, I grew up in a home in which I heard almost no Yiddish.
45:22It was very American.
45:24My mother grew up in a home where Christmas trees were put up, not menorahs.
45:31In which Easter egg hunts were a bigger deal than Passover seders.
45:37But I want to be clear, that had nothing to do with not loving being Jewish.
45:41They were passionately Jewish.
45:43It's who they were through and through.
45:46I think there is a very strong gastronomic memory and a gastronomic identity.
45:54You know, some people say, the only part of me is Jewish is, you know, is gefilte fish or whatever.
46:00What comes back, you know, are the smells and the tastes and the food from my apartment and my mother's
46:11kitchen and all that stuff.
46:14I mean, the chopped herring, the pichar, the varenicas, the borscht.
46:22Fleschica borscht was like ambrosia.
46:29I first came to New York in 1963 as a freshman at Yeshiva University.
46:34We have dinner in the dorm cafeteria.
46:37And there's a little brown glob on my plate.
46:40So I asked the guy next to me, what is that?
46:43What is that?
46:44What is it?
46:45It's chopped liver.
46:46I never saw chopped liver in my life.
46:49Next day they served as cholent.
46:51I never saw cholent in my life.
46:52They served as a kugel.
46:53I never saw a kugel in my life.
46:54All of the food that we had, everything was brown.
46:57Roasted chicken and kugel and cholent and gefilte fish and honey cake for dessert and tea.
47:04Everything's brown.
47:06Oh!
47:07In our world, everything was colorful.
47:09Bright vegetables, salads.
47:11When I first brought my wife to meet my parents in Seattle, my wife counted one meal where she had
47:1813 different vegetables, half of which she never saw before in her life.
47:21I have to tell you that the meals I lusted for the most, to my embarrassment, are Swanson dinners, TV
47:28dinners.
47:29Those things never exist in the rest of the world.
47:31But you've always seen advertised, those meals advertised in magazines.
47:36You had no idea what they were.
47:37And eventually you can go out to the supermarket and buy them.
47:40So how could you resist?
47:41So first of all, it is a miracle that after a number of generations in America, Jews are still Jewish.
47:49How observant, you know, there's a variety of levels, but Jews are still Jewish, which is an amazing thing.
47:59That deserves a whole show on its own.
48:05But the fact that the observance is growing, and the study of Torah is growing, nobody expected that.
48:16My grandfather didn't expect that when he came to America.
48:19He gave up on me.
48:22My family, personally, I knew I was a Jew.
48:26I knew it was a good thing to be a Jew.
48:28It was purely ethical.
48:31To be a Jew meant to be a Democrat.
48:33To be a Jew was to be against McCarthy.
48:35To be a Jew was to believe that life wasn't fair, and that we were here to make it more
48:40fair.
48:41Do you hear the word God in what I'm saying?
48:43No.
48:45Torah?
48:45No.
48:46Ritual?
48:47No.
48:48That wasn't what it was to be a Jew.
48:49It was to behave in this highly ethical way.
48:54And it wasn't until much later in my life that I came to appreciate ritual.
49:01Seda was a man with a big gray beard, dressed like a Russian peasant.
49:08One day, I was looking through the doorway, as he was praying.
49:15And the light was coming through the window, above the stand where the Torah was, and lit
49:24him up.
49:25He glowed.
49:28I stood there next to him.
49:31Nobody else was around.
49:34And I absorbed that spirit at a level that I didn't realize was happening until I got older.
49:44I love being part of something, even if we've never met.
49:49Your last name is Goldberg.
49:50My last name is ambiguous, Greenleaf.
49:53But we know that we're Jews, and we know that there's a similarity there.
49:58And I like being part of something bigger than I am.
50:03Now I face an interesting situation because my husband's Catholic.
50:08People say things like, well, how are you going to raise your kids?
50:12I don't even know where to begin.
50:16My case is further complicated.
50:18They're adopted.
50:18One's Cajun.
50:19One's African American.
50:21There's a lot of things there.
50:23But I want to make sure that being Jewish isn't lost on them.
50:29I was born a Jew.
50:31My family died because they were Jews.
50:34And my father's words saved me more than any words I ever spoke.
50:41My father should rest in peace.
50:44He said, you survive.
50:48You honor us by living, not by crying.
50:53The future, you think about every minute.
51:00That would be our greatest honor.
51:04And I live by that.
51:08For my great-grandparents, it was like that old song says,
51:12we gotta get out of this place if it's the last thing we ever do.
51:16For my grandmother, it was, we're gonna make this place home.
51:22For the first time in 2,000 years, we're gonna feel at home in the diaspora.
51:29And for my mother, it was, I'm gonna be so at home that I will take pride even in those
51:35rituals I don't practice.
51:37Because that's what I can give my kid.
51:40And for me, it was to embrace some of those rituals.
51:43But never at the cost of failing to appreciate the depth of Jewishness, the depth of faith, the depth of
51:51everything good in those previous generations.
51:56I am thanking God almost every day for being here.
52:02Almost every day, every time I think of it.
52:05And I'm trying to impress upon my children how wonderful this country is.
52:10They know it.
52:12And there isn't a moment.
52:14That does not change the fact, the love of my country, of this country.
52:21And this is the way I'm gonna, I'm gonna die this way.
52:25And, and, and, and on my, and on my tombstone, you will see, Melvin loves this country.
52:34I remember when I chose to start wearing a kippah, right?
52:40Yarmulke, skull cap, call it anything you want.
52:44We walk into my great-grandmother's home.
52:46And she was like the queen of the family.
52:48She lived to be 104 years old.
52:50And I, now 12, have decided to start wearing one of these.
52:55I bend down to kiss her.
52:58And as I do, I feel like two talons grab onto my head and tear the kippah out of body
53:07pins and all, right out of my hair and throw it on the ground.
53:12And she looks at me and she says, I did not come to America for that kind of silliness.
53:21And I'm now 12 years old, newly observant, surrounded by a mother, a father, a grandmother, a grandfather, three siblings,
53:31two great aunts, and my great grandmother.
53:33And I'm like, what am I supposed to say?
53:36My mother stepped in.
53:38And she said, using one of the few Yiddish words I ever heard growing up,
53:43No, Bobby!
53:44That's the Yiddish word.
53:47No, Bobby.
53:48You came to America so he could choose to, if he wanted to.
53:53Who died.
53:58Yeah.
54:12Yeah.
54:21He's been there.
54:22He was an old man.
54:58Be More PBS.
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