"Abba Eban:" "She rose up from the waters of New York harbor in 1886 like some ancient goddess, presiding silently over the gateway to a continent." "Woman:" "Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, and her name mother of exiles." "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore." "Eban:" "These are the words of the poet Emma Lazarus." "It was no accident that, as a Jew, she could voice the dreams of immigrants of every faith, of every nationality who came to this land." "America was different:" "Large enough and broad enough to allow for all beliefs..." "Rich enough in natural resources to answer the needs of all who came." "America was different." "It promised those who came that what they might have been was less important than what they might become." "Eban:" "On an island in New York harbor stand a cluster of abandoned government buildings." "The nearby docks and empty ferry slips speak of a time when thousands of men, women, and children arrived here each day and first set foot on American soil." "80 years ago, millions of immigrants passed through these halls and crossed the threshold to a new life in a new land." "Past the Statue of Liberty they came, and on to Ellis Island, in the closing years of the 19th century." "By the thousands, by the millions, and also one by one:" "the poor, the disenfranchised, the hopeful, the adventurous, the persecuted, the oppressed." "One by one, from Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Russia, and among them, nearly two million Jews from Eastern Europe." "To the tapestry which was America, more than 100 ethnic groups would bring their special threads of color and of culture." "It was not only the size and the richness of the continent to which they came that made America different." "It was what they brought with them and how they interacted with each other that made America different." "America was a nation peopled by immigrants, a nation whose very foundations had been laid by immigrant settlers as early as the 16th century." "Many of the first settlers in America had crossed the Atlantic seeking a refuge from political and religious intolerance in Europe." "The Atlantic was a road of escape, open to anyone who could raise passage." "It was also a commercial highway." "Among those involved in Atlantic shipping and trade were descendants of those Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century." "In 1654 a small group of Portuguese Jews sailing from Brazil to Amsterdam were blown off course and stranded without money." "23 Jewish men, women, and children made their way to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, hoping to find in this place the toleration their kinsmen enjoyed in Amsterdam itself." "The governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, a man of many prejudices, wrote to his superiors in Holland..." "Man:" "We pray that the deceitful race be not allowed to infect this new colony." "Giving them liberty, we cannot refuse the Lutherans and Papists." "Eban:" "But Jews were deeply involved in Dutch commerce." "Stuyvesant's superiors were sympathetic but firm." "Man:" "We have decided that the Portuguese Jews may travel and trade to and in New Netherland and live and remain there." "You will now govern yourself accordingly." "Eban:" "New Amsterdam, later to become New York, remained a place where Jews might settle, but in other places, there was little toleration." "Many of America's first colonists had brought with them the prejudices of Europe." "In Massachusetts, the Puritans forbade other forms of worship than their own." "In Virginia, the Anglican church was state-supported, and heresy was a crime." "But other colonies were run as commercial ventures, and anyone was welcome who could develop their land or contribute to their trade." "In the course of the 18th century, a few Jews came to the new continent as ship owners and merchants." "They settled in the port cities of Savannah," "Charleston, Philadelphia, Newport, and New York." "In these cities, it mattered little that they were Jews." "Everyone was a foreigner." "To that extent, everyone was alike." "They became a small but integral part of colonial society." "But the very freedom of America that so benefited individuals was dangerous to the preservation of a Jewish community." "The Jews who came to America left behind them all the institutions that had daily reinforced their identity as Jews- the rabbis, the Jewish teachers, the religious schools." "In America, they were on their own." "Without the leadership and structure of a separate Jewish community, they were free to set aside their jewishness if they wished, and many of them did." "And even if they wanted to remain Jews, with whom could they pray or socialize or, most importantly, marry?" "There were so few Jews that it was almost impossible to live a Jewish life in colonial America." "What kept the Jewish community alive in these early years was a continuing but small infusion of new Jewish immigrants from abroad." "By the 18th century, the bustling ports of the new world were a vital link in the trade routes of the British empire." "But British rule and British taxes soon came to be resented by many of the prosperous colonists." "In these quiet streets of Philadelphia, a storm of protest was unleashed." "Delegates from all the colonies gathered and, in July of 1776, proclaimed their defiance of British rule." "The forces of the British Empire were marshaled against the revolt" "For 5 years, the struggle continued." "The fragile union of American forces was constantly on the verge of collapse, but it held for long enough to defeat the British." "Here in this room, in 1787, delegates gathered to write a contract that would bind the states together for their mutual defense." "For this contract- the constitution- to be accepted by all, it had to be amended by a set of declarations known as the bill of rights." "Man:" "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." "Eban:" "To bring together the diversity of interests and peoples that was America, toleration had been made a fundamental principle of American law." "In 1790, George Washington visited this synagogue in Newport, Rhode island." "To its congregation, he addressed a letter that has become a classic statement of religious freedom in America:" ""The citizens of the United States of America" ""all possess alike liberty of conscience," ""for happily, the government of the United States," ""which gives to bigotry no sanction," ""to persecution no assistance," ""requires only that they who live under its protection," ""should demean themselves as good citizens." ""may the children of the stock of Abraham" ""who dwell in this land" ""continue to merit and enjoy the good will" ""of the other inhabitants," ""while every one shall sit in safety" ""under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. "" "The letter is signed "G. Washington. "" "In the towns and villages of a growing nation, different religious groups were now living side by side." "The Jews, a small fraction of the population- only a few thousand in number- were fully integrated in the nation, joining even in the government of the land." "The constitution guaranteed the equal rights of all citizens, though it could not do away with their prejudices." "Mordecai Manuel Noah, a Jewish playwright and a prominent politician, was appointed sheriff of New York in 1822." ""What a pity," wrote one New Yorker," ""that Christians are to be hung by a Jew. "" ""what a pity," replied sheriff Noah," ""that Christians should have to be hung. "" "In 1807, a man named Fulton harnessed steam to propel riverboats along the great waterways that led to the interior of the continent." "Within 5 years, the adventurous were being advised of regular service from the eastern seaboard into the wilderness of Ohio and Kentucky." "The news of opportunities on the American frontier reached as far as Europe." "Before long, settlers were arriving by the thousands." "In the 1850s, spurred by political turmoil in Europe, a million came from the German lands alone, and among them, more than 100,000 German-speaking Jews." "It was the beginning of a substantial Jewish presence in America." "Leaving behind the close-knit Jewish communities of Europe, these Jews discovered in the backwoods of this continent a solitary way of life unlike any they had ever known." "Throughout this frontier region were thousands of remote farmsteads, hundreds of isolated settlements that had only one tie to the outside world- the itinerant peddler." "For many of the young Jewish men who came to America, a horse and a cart full of goods were an early step on the road toward fortune." "The peddler was a welcome quest on the frontier." "He brought news." "He brought goods." "He brought the necessities the pioneer family could not make for itself." "But frontier life was often perplexing for the Jewish immigrant." "From the diary of a peddler in the 1840s..." "Man:" "We have left our friends and acquaintances, our relatives and our parents, our language and our customs, only to sell our wares in the wild places of America... in isolated farmhouses and tiny hamlets." "Leading such a life, none of us is able to observe the smallest commandment." "On Sunday, every farmer urges me to attend church." "Eban:" "A Jewish peddler, striving to survive, found it difficult to avoid working on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, difficult to observe the dietary laws of his people." "On the American continent, with its frontier ways and scattered settlements, the immigrant had to take life as he found it." "He had to leave behind his old language, his old customs and experiences." "He had to become a pioneer among other pioneers." "It started with a 100-pound pack, with peddlers who trudged mile after weary mile." "In time the pack gave way to the one-horse wagon." "If he was fortunate, the Jewish peddler saved and eventually opened a general store." "The general store frequently became the focus of a permanent settlement." "Because he was an early settler, the storekeeper frequently became the sheriff or mayor or leading citizen of the town." "Other Jews might join him there and form a small Jewish congregation." "The German Jews became part and parcel of the epic opening of the American west." "Jewish merchants were among many immigrants who contributed in these years to the development of a new America." "Communities all over the land were under construction to keep pace with a growing population." "By 1860, in the swampy district of Columbia, an ambitious program of construction was under way." "With boundless energy and enthusiasm," "Americans dreamed of one nation reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific." "But this land full of hope and ambition was also a land deeply divided." "An intractable quarrel between North and South over slavery and states' rights was tearing the country apart." "1861... immigrants arriving at New York, Atlanta, or Baltimore were enlisted to fight on the battlefields of the civil war, to give their lives for a cause they barely understood." "It was a bloody war, a heartbreaking war, a war between brothers." "Some 7,000 Jews fought in the Union Army." "At least 3,000 fought for the Confederacy." "For 4 years, the war dragged on until, in 1865, the Union forces at last prevailed." "More than half a million Americans died in the civil war, more than in any other war America has ever fought." "It was at great cost that the United States were reunited." "The needs of war had catapulted the industrial North into an explosive economic and commercial expansion." "New factories created new jobs by the thousands." ""Wanted, a million men." "Good wages. "" "And the emigrants came in ever-increasing numbers." "The factories were humming, and the railroads reaching outward to the frontier and beyond." "Over the next 40 years, the continent was spanned by a network of iron rails." "It was a time of brash individualism, of the discovery and exploitation of seemingly endless natural resources." "It was a time of untrammeled and unregulated speculation." "Out of the tumult of unbridled competition, there emerged a new society... the rich and powerful the notorious, the famous." "Andrew Carnegie- the son of a Scottish weaver." "His steelworks would make him the richest man in the world." "Jay Gould- a country store clerk from upper New York state who rose to control many of the nation's railroads." "John D. Rockefeller- an oil man from Cleveland whose father had been a petty tradesman." "They moved with the frontier- the physical frontier and the frontiers of opportunity and ingenuity, wherever they might lie." "In Leadville, Colorado," "Meyer Guggenheim, a Jewish immigrant from Switzerland, purchased, sight unseen, two silver mines with money he had made as a peddler in the South." "The silver mines were flooded." "he pumped them out and discovered, to his disappointment, that they contained little silver, but a low grade of copper ore instead." "With his 7 sons, he developed refining processes that would make that ore profitable." "In doing so, they established a foundation for the entire American copper industry." "From remote mining centers and cattle towns in the West, livestock and minerals were shipped by rail to the east." "in return came manufactured goods to fill the shelves of general stores in towns and villages throughout the nation." "As the economy grew, as towns became small cities, the Jewish shopkeepers prospered." "General stores became department stores." "Macy's;" "Saks;" "Bambergers;" "Gimbels;" "Bloomingdale's;" "Sears, Roebuck... throughout the country, most department stores were owned and created by Jews." "By the 1870s, a new group of immigrants began to come from Germany, attracted by the flourishing economy." "They were German Jews whose families in Europe were involved in finance and banking." "Jewish businessmen turned to these Jewish financiers for the loans and investment capital they could not easily obtain from gentile bankers." "German Jewish immigrants- the Loebs and Kuhns and Schiffs and Seligmans- joint in the task of financing a nation and shared richly in the fruits of their labors." "The Jews of German origin were, to all outward appearances, fully integrated in American life." "They had left behind the Jewish communal life of Europe to live as individuals in this new land." "But they wished to preserve the intimacy and fellowship of the past, to preserve their religious heritage." "Their rabbis, all of whom were trained in Europe, struggled to help them find an American expression of jewishness." "Throughout America, the German Jews built synagogues of great beauty, like this one, B'nai Yeshurun in Cincinnati." "But Jews in America were not certain what the content of their Judaism ought to be." "There were no central authorities to define the rules of Jewish life." "All the Jews wanted their synagogues to be American houses of worship, but practices varied widely from congregation to congregation." "In some synagogues, men and women were allowed to sit together so that families would not be separated." "Some argued that rabbis should deliver weekly sermons." "For others, it was enough that some English be used in their prayers." "The most extreme wanted worship on Sunday instead of the traditional Saturday." "the Jewish community was engaged in an ongoing debate." "Among those who sought to bring the community together was rabbi Isaac M. Wise of Cincinnati." "In 1873, he created a Union of American Hebrew congregations and, shortly thereafter, a seminary where American rabbis could be trained." "In so doing, he laid the foundations of an American Jewish movement called reform." "Wise had hoped to unite all American Jews in a single movement, but there was too much diversity of opinion, too much disagreement." "When, in 1885, reform rabbis publicly renounced all Jewish dietary laws, all laws of dress and outward custom, more traditional rabbis were aghast." "They set about organizing a seminary of their own." "Rabbis trained at this new institution- the Jewish theological seminary- would eventually establish the American movement known as conservative Judaism." "Whatever approach they took, the Jews of this country were defining a Judaism that was distinctively American." "Germans, English, Irish, Jews." "on these streets of New York, as on the streets of other American cities, immigrants from many lands had joined in creating an American way of life." "The stream of immigrants into this world was unending." "By the 1870s, as many as 300,000 arrived each year." "In the 1880s, the stream became a torrent." "Between the years 1880 and 1924, more than 25 million people would land at the ports of America." "They would change the face of its cities." "They would change its culture." "They came from Italy and Germany, from Russia and from Poland, in search of opportunities in the industry of a rapidly growing America." "Among them were nearly two million Jews from Eastern Europe." "These Jews came to America fleeing pogroms and poverty." "Whole families were uprooted leaving behind their old lives, hoping for a new and better life in America." "The place of arrival for most, starting in 1892, was Ellis Island." "They were examined, questioned, and tagged, submitted to a process they could not understand, thousands every day." "You could arrive at Ellis Island with one name and leave with another, particularly if your name was hard to spell or your accent difficult for an American to understand." "You might be detained for medical or other reasons, not knowing if you would be allowed into the country." "but the majority were admitted and placed on ferries bound for the island of Manhattan." "Man:" "Where am I going?" "What will I do?" "In Grodno I was at least someone in the store, but in America, without language, with only a bit of education?" "Eban:" "For thousands, the crossing from Ellis Island to Manhattan was only the first stage in a journey that took them to Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, or other American cities and towns, but many Jewish immigrants landed in lower Manhattan" "and made their way by foot to the crowded streets of New York's Lower East Side." "It was congested beyond belief, racked by illness and exhaustion, impoverished beyond description." "The first thing the immigrant had to do was to find a place to live." "Conditions were appalling." "4, 5, and 6 to a room, no place to wash." "Parents and children crowded together, uncertain of their future." "Woman:" "For father, there was nothing else to do but be a peddler." "He had no profession." "He didn't know the language." "What else could he do?" "Eban:" "If the immigrant was lucky, he earned enough to feed his children." "Woman:" "To help, our mother took in boarders." "She made all our clothes." "She walked blocks to reach a place where bread was a half cent less." "She collected boxes and old wood to burn in the stove." "Her hands became hardened." "Yet we children always had clean and whole clothing." "Eban:" "Clothing." "For most Jewish immigrants, it was more than something to wear." "It was the lifeblood of existence." "Its manufacture was a Jewish business." "German Jews provided the fabric." "Immigrants took it home and sewed it into garments." "Every apartment a factory..." "Father, mother, and children, the workers." "7 days a week, from dawn far into the night." "There was no escape from work." "Children were raised on cut fabric amid dust and lint." "For some, the burdens of that life led to tragedy- to illness and disease, to the breakup of homes, to desertions, and sometimes to violence and crime." "Among those who set out to help this troubled community was the journalist Abraham Cahan." "In the newspaper he created, the Jewish daily forward, he spoke to the people in their own language, Yiddish, answering their questions, giving practical advice." "Girl:" "Worthy editor, we have been in the country two years, and my father, who is a frail man, is the only one working to support the whole family." "Many dearest friends at the forward," "I have been jobless for 6 months now." "If I had known it would be so bitter for me here," "I wouldn't have come." "I beg you to help." "Woman:" "My husband deserted me and our 3 small children, leaving us in desperate need." "It breaks my heart, but I have come to the conclusion..." "Man:" "Dear Mr. editor of the forward," "I read the troubles of family life in your letter column every day very attentively, but my own troubles are so great, so enormous, that I ask you right on the spot-help!" "From the moment of their arrival, the immigrants looked to each other for help- first to relatives, or to townspeople from the old country." "People from the same towns formed groups known as landsmenschaften, where among their old neighbors they could find fellowship or help in times of need." "There were fraternal lodges, benevolent and free loan societies, burial societies, and, in makeshift quarters, hundreds of small orthodox congregations where immigrants came to worship and to study." "Most important of all, they came to be among their old townspeople." "In small "schuls," as they were called, the orthodox traditions of Eastern Europe were preserved." "For some among the immigrants, the synagogue was the surviving link to the life they had left behind." "[praying in Hebrew]" "But many of these immigrants, like the German Jews before them, found it difficult to hold to the traditional ways." "Some orthodox Jews believed that a new set of standards were needed in this new land, flexible standards yet faithful to the spirit of the Eastern European tradition." "By 1915, a new generation of orthodox rabbis was appearing, familiar with the world of general history, literature, and science, while preserving the traditional knowledge of Torah and Talmud." "It was a development that would ultimately lead to the creation of yeshiva university." "A new kind of American Judaism was being established," "American Orthodoxy." "Out of the materials of their European past came a vigorous new expression of Jewish culture." "In cafes and meeting halls of the Lower East Side, there were free lectures, free concerts, and, for a nickel, that marvelous escape from the wretchedness of daily life- the Yiddish theatre." "[man singing in Yiddish]" "Many of the greatest Yiddish plays, still performed throughout the world wherever the language is spoken, were written on the streets of New York." "[speaking Yiddish]" "Eban:" "To many Americans, this Yiddish culture was a strange and unwelcome arrival on the shores of the United States." "Many Jews of German origin looked askance at the immigrants from Eastern Europe." "The affluent German Jews, those long established in America, were embarrassed by the culture, the dress, the language, and the poverty of the newcomers." "They sought to teach them how to become Americans instead." "Jacob Schiff, with others, established the Henry street settlement and the educational alliance on the Lower East Side, where new arrivals could puzzle out the intricacies of the English language." "There were free public libraries, and public schools where, by the thousands, the children of immigrants found a path to achievement in American life." "If the fathers and mothers had been immigrants, the children would be Americans." "All the immigrants who arrived in these years" "Italians, Irish, Scandinavians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews- all were struggling to find their way in the new country." "In towns and villages across America, year after year, crowds gathered in celebration of the fourth of July." "They gathered to celebrate a country they knew and understood, not a land inhabited by aliens, not a land whose city streets were filled with a babble of incomprehensible tongues." "For many Americans, the immigrant world seemed un-American, a danger to the old-fashioned values of American life." "As immigration increased, the reaction to it grew violent." "Newspapers and editorials led the attack." "Man:" "These people are not Americans, but the very scum of Europe- long-haired, wild-eyed, bad-smelling, atheistic foreign wretches who never did an honest hour's work in their lives." "Eban:" "There were calls for a new patriotism, for an America cleansed of foreign elements." "Since the 1880s, there had been repeated attempts to stop immigration." "But America was growing, and its appetite for new goods and the products of industry seemed insatiable." "The need of American industrialists for cheap foreign labor was not to be denied." "All over industrialized America, factory workers were recent immigrants." "There was no western frontier left for new immigrants to settle." "The wilderness they faced was one of slums and noise, of industry and grinding labor." "Beginning in the last decades of the 19th century, workers throughout America began to organize themselves into unions." "A generation of working men and women endured bitter strikes, privation, and even violence as they struggled to gain some control over their own destiny." "[sewing machines working]" "At the beginning of the 20th century, more than 150,000 Jews worked in the clothing industry of New York's Lower East Side." "It had grown beyond the confines of the immigrants' homes." "Thousands now worked in factories and lofts, cutting, sewing, and pressing." "The quarters were cramped." "there was no ventilation in the heat of summer." "The hours were long and hard, the conditions hazardous." "[women singing]" "In November of 1909, 30,000 shirtwaist makers, most of them Jewish women in their teens or early 20s, walked off their jobs." "The protest was spontaneous." "It brought the industry to a standstill." "5 months later, 60,000 cloak-makers went on strike." "It came to be known as the great revolt of 1910." "The Jewish workers were joining together to demand decent working conditions, fair pay- to demand that they be accepted as Americans with an equal right to secure and dignified lives." "On March the 25th, 1911, at the triangle shirtwaist company near Washington square, a fire broke out on the 11th floor." "[bells ringing]" "By the time the fire department arrived, the blaze was out of control." "An eyewitness reported:" "Man:" "The firemen were helpless." "ladders reached only to the seventh floor." "The firemen stood about and stared as one woman after another fell from the burning building." "And below, screaming and howling, thousands of laborers from surrounding factories." "Eban: 175 workers lost their lives, most of them young Jewish and Italian women." "The grief of the community was almost too much to bear." "The tragedy of the fire aroused widespread sympathy." "A groundswell of public concern would ultimately lead to laws governing the sanitary conditions and safety of the workplace, but it was not only sympathy that the immigrant workers earned in these troubled years." "Out of the cloak-makers strike of 1910 came a document called the protocol of peace, an agreement unprecedented on the American scene." "Drafted by Louis Brandeis, who would soon become the first Jewish member of the United States supreme court, it established procedures of outside arbitration, a pattern that would become a model solution to all future labor conflicts in America." "Meanwhile, however, American attitudes toward immigrants and all things foreign were being complicated by conflicts of greater scale far beyond America's shores." "1914... the great war broke upon Europe." "Shipping across the Atlantic was threatened, and in 1917, America reluctantly was drawn into the war." "The strains of war weakened the fabric of European society." "In Russia, the czarist empire began to crumble." "In the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, seized power." "They saw their victory as the first of a series of revolutions that would sweep the world and overthrow established governments everywhere." "An uneasy order descended upon the western nations." "The cost of the war had been great." "In its wake, there was unemployment and labor unrest." "The international economy was in chaos." "In America, the end of the war brought the end of a fragile truce between unions and management." "Within a year, there were no fewer than 3,600 strikes." "They were suppressed by troops, national guards, private police forces." "Many Americans considered the strikes a sign that recent immigrants were plotting against America, that a communist revolution was at hand." "In 1919 there was a rash of terrorist bombings, one of them almost taking the life of the United States attorney general," "A. Mitchell Palmer." "He became convinced that the "red menace" was real." "He organized a series of raids." "Thousands of immigrants were arrested, beaten, confined without trial." "Anyone with a russian-sounding name was suspected of being a revolutionary." "Many were deported." "In these anxious years, the Ku Klux Klan grew rapidly in both North and South." "Its goal-to fight back the immigrants, to control the Negroes, the Catholics, the Jews." "In this atmosphere of hatred and fear, the Congress of the United States in 1924 voted to slam shut America's open door." "The mass migrations that had given the country its special character were over." "The new law was designed to halt immigration from Europe's poorest regions." "The new Americans who had come from those lands" "Italians, Jews, and others- felt that they themselves were being attacked." "For the Jews in America, it was a time of confusion." "they had every reason to believe that they or their children might find success and acceptance in America, but they also had reason to fear." "There were many Americans who resented the success of anyone who was not white, anglo-saxon, protestant, and in the 1920s, it seemed that intolerance might gain the upper hand." "Intolerance had been growing since the last quarter of the 19th century." "Successful German Jews had been excluded from hotels, resorts, clubs, and private schools, but they were not content to remain silent in the face of discrimination." "By the beginning of the 20th century, they established organizations dedicated not only to the protection of their rights, but to the defense of Jewish communities in other lands as well, organizations such as the American Jewish Committee" "and the Antidefamation League of B'nai Brith." "At the end of the First World War, concern for the welfare of Jewish refugees in Europe led growing numbers to support the call for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine." "The American Jewish congress," "Hadassah, the Zionist Organization of America, and other Jewish institutions began to play an important role in international Jewish affairs as anti-semitism threatened in many lands, even in America." "In the 1920s, German and east European Jews alike faced a resurgence of American-style intolerance." "It was expressed through discrimination in housing and employment, through admissions quotas at universities, and through exclusion from the elite social institutions of America." "But elite society was only a small part of the American world." "25 million immigrants had come to the cities of America since 1880." "They had changed the flavor of its culture, the accent of its speech, its dress, its humor, and its sense of self." "America's popular culture was new and vital." "It drew on the energies, the experiences, the dreams of many people." "Out of the Jewish neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, and dozens of other American cities came a bursting forth of talent and achievement in every phase of American life." "* blue skies smiling at me * * nothing but blue skies do I see * * oh, ho, ho * * bluebirds singing a song *" "Eban:" "These immigrants and children of immigrants eagerly discovered new opportunities in technologies and art forms that never existed before where prejudice was no barrier." "Most of America's film pioneers were Jews" "Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor." "Many of the stars were Jews" "Emmanuel Goldenberg, known as Edward G. Robinson;" "Melvin Hesselberg, Melvyn Douglas..." "Theodosia Goodman, Theda Bara;" "the Marx brothers." "The Jews had come to America with dreams of a new life." "They went on to reflect and to shape, in the films they made, the dreams of all America." "But the majority of the Jews took other paths into the mainstream of American life." "If their fathers had been students of the Talmud given to poring over the intricacies of religious law, the children took their love of study and discussion and gave it new form." "Through the colleges and universities of America, they made their way into new careers in law, in medicine, in the sciences, in government, and in teaching." "The impoverished Jews who had come from Eastern Europe had passed through the crowded slams of America's cities and, within two generations, had reached a place of distinction in American life." "Among the many Jews who figured prominently in these years were Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, justices of the United States supreme court;" "Bernard Baruch, statesman and advisor to presidents;" "the writers Gertrude Stein," "George S. Kaufman, and Clifford Odets;" "the composers Aaron Copland," "Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin." "And there were others beyond count." "What made all this possible was the very character of American civilization- above all, its diversity." "It was not a uniform culture, as in England, France, Poland, Germany." "If you are different in America, so were many other people." "The Jews were just one group among many who joined in this new world, and in the rich and diverse society of America," "Jews found a kind of acceptance they had never experienced anywhere else." "The Jews became an integral and creative part of American civilization." "With all others who had come to these shores, the Jews had helped to shape and had themselves been shaped by the America they called "The Golden Land. ""