While not all Oregonians,
nor all Oregonian Jews, wear jeans and Birkenstocks with socks,
there is a certain flavor of life in Oregon that can’t be found anywhere else.
It takes a certain kind of personality to wear jeans and Birkenstocks with
socks to synagogue services, someone who is very comfortable with who she is.
Our identity is how we perceive ourselves. This perception grows and changes
over time, influenced by our life experiences. It is with this identity that we
relate to others within social groups and how we come to find connections.
Traditionally, the Lower East Side of New York is considered to be the “authentic”
American Jewish experience, however that certainly doesn’t make it the only
experience. Embracing a
Western Identity by Ellen Eisenberg explores Jewish Oregonian
history starting with pioneers in the mid-nineteenth century to Portlanders of
the mid-twentieth century. In an excerpt from the introduction to her book,
Eisenberg writes about how growing up on the east coast helped foster her
interest in understanding the differences between the eastern and western
American Jewish identity.
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Like many western Jews, I am a transplant from the East. After
a childhood in suburban Washington, DC, college in Minnesota, and graduate school
in Philadelphia, I moved to Salem, Oregon in 1990. At the time, I had no
intention of doing research on Oregon Jews—my dissertation focused on Jewish agricultural
communities in New Jersey, and I was interested in comparative research on
similar settlements in Argentina. Yet within a few years, I found myself
increasingly intrigued by the Jewish history of my newly adopted state and
region.
To
be sure, shifting my research westward had practical benefits. Moving to Oregon
with an infant in arms and having another child four years later provided a
strong incentive to find projects that could be supported without prolonged
trips away from home. Yet along with such pragmatic concerns, I was intrigued
by a Jewish community that, while certainly not completely foreign, was
noticeably different from those I had known back east. Part of this difference
was simply a reflection of social differences between regions. I
quickly learned that some Oregonians wear jeans and Birkenstocks (with socks)
to synagogue services, just as they wear them to restaurants, meetings, and the
theater.
Yet
some differences seemed deeper. At a temple board retreat a few years after I arrived,
all participants were asked to present a brief “Jewish autobiography.” I was
surprised to learn that, of about a dozen participants, the rabbi and I were
the only two in the room who were born Jewish and married to partners who were
also born Jewish. I had grown up in a Conservative congregation where it seemed
virtually all my peers shared a background roughly similar to mine—two Jewish parents
from New York or some other eastern city and grandparents (possibly
great-grandparents) who had immigrated to the United States from Eastern
Europe. In Salem, the stories were far more diverse—converts, children of
converts, children and grandchildren of immigrants who had settled in Colorado
or Idaho or California rather than New York—as well as descendants of families
who had been in America longer and come from a variety of places other than
Eastern Europe.
Teaching
immigration history at Willamette University and participating in the American
Ethnic Studies program, I learned that the kinds of East/West differences I was
observing were not confined to Jewish ethnic identity. European American
ethnicities in general seemed blurrier in the West. Growing up in the East in the
1960s and 1970s, “ethnicity” had included many categories of European
Americans; as kids, we were aware of one another’s ethnic past. It was not a
major issue—there were no ethnic gangs in my
suburban neighborhood—but there was an awareness of roots. Many families
identified as Jewish or Italian or Irish or German American, and, although there
were exceptions, most seemed to identify with just one of these identities.
There was a set of ideas associated with each of these labels that included how
many children the family was likely to have and what kinds of foods they were
likely to eat. By the time we were in grade school we could easily sort
surnames into the most common ethnic categories. The Goldsteins? Obviously,
Jewish. The O’Shaughnessys? Clearly Irish. The D’Ambrosios? Italian. There were
a few more recent Asian and Latino immigrant families, but in such small
numbers that they didn’t seem to constitute a group, so conversations about
ethnicity were far more likely to focus on European categories. And in suburban
Washington, DC, in the 1960s and 1970s, the language of race tended to employ
only two categories: black and white.
In
contrast, I found that my (mostly) West Coast students have trouble thinking
about ethnicity as a category they can apply to European Americans. When I talk
with them about immigration, they think of Asians and Latinos, not Europeans.
When I ask them about their family histories, the majority of those of European
American origin are unable to point to one ethnic identity and instead present
a laundry list—“my mom’s family is Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, and French; my
dad’s mom is Irish and his dad’s family is Scottish, German, and Russian.”
Students in Willamette’s Jewish Student Union present “Jewish autobiographies”
not unlike those I encountered at the board retreat—few were born to two Jewish
parents and raised Jewishly. Far more come from families with diverse ancestry
and a mix of traditions.
Not
only do my western students of European descent not identify with a particular
ethnic group, they also have little ability to recognize European ethnicity.
When I talk in my American Jewish history class about a film or television
character who, to me, seems obviously Jewish, I learn that a number of my
students completely miss the identifiers. And, because they don’t speak the
“language” of European ethnic identity, they frequently mistake non-Jewish New
Yorkers for Jews. For years, my friend and colleague, Bill Smaldone—whose name
is obviously identifiable to most easterners of my generation as Italian American—often
has been misidentified by many of our students (and more than a few colleagues)
as Jewish, based on his New York accent. They make the same mistake with the
character George Costanza from Seinfeld (and Kramer and even Elaine,
despite the shiksappeal episode).
In
this, of course, students are reflecting not only a lack of familiarity with
European American markers of ethnicity, but also a popular culture that has
strongly identified Jews with New York—so much so that, for many of my
students, to be a New Yorker is to be Jewish (at least if one is white). As
Hasia Diner explains in her essay “American West, New York Jewish,” New York
has been depicted as “the essence of what it means to be Jewish in America.”
And New York is often juxtaposed in American culture with the West, identified
as “that which has long been essentially America.”
Diner argues that films such as Blazing Saddles (1974)
and The Frisco Kid (1979) play on the contrast between that which is
Jewish and “not quite America” and the “real” America that is the West. Thus, Jews—especially East European ones—are, quite literally
(and often comedically) “out of place” in the American West, particularly the
stereotypical, historic frontier West.
These
patterns of ethnic understanding in popular culture mirror scholarship on
ethnicity and the West. Over the last several decades, there has been a
proliferation of work on western ethnicity and diversity in the wake of the New
Western History. Yet in this
scholarship, “ethnicity” and “diversity” nearly always denote non-European
identities, and European immigrants have generally been neglected in western history.
With the exception of Los Angeles, where a scholarship focusing
on the interplay among a wide variety of groups including Latinos, Asian
Americans, Jews, and other European Americans has emerged in the past several
decades, much of the literature on ethnicity in the West focuses on non-Europeans, with
Jews and other European immigrants simply categorized as “white.”
Such
thinking is reinforced by scholarship on American Jewish history, which has
focused heavily on New York as the mother lode of all that is Jewish in
America. Reflecting the dominant place of New York Jewry in terms of community
demographics, historians have often equated New York with American Jewry. Even
locally produced western histories portray communities as a pale shadow of the
“true” New York Jewish experience. Thus, community histories frequently compare “Jewish” neighborhoods such as Boyle
Heights in Los Angeles, the Fillmore in San Francisco, South Portland, and Seattle’s
Central District to the iconic Lower East Side. In The Jews of Oregon,
Steven Lowenstein describes South Portland’s
community as “largely self-contained,” “a separate community,” and explicitly
links it to the Lower East Side of New York. Oral histories focusing on South Portland in the 1920s and
1930s describe a strong Jewish atmosphere, with frequent comparisons to the
Lower East Side, and even some, however metaphorical, to a shtetl.
Despite
the explicit or implicit connections in these descriptions to the landscape of
the Lower East Side, Jewish communities in the region were profoundly shaped by
the western experience, beginning with the distinctive migration pattern that
brought Jews to the West. Whereas millions of Jews migrated directly from Europe
to eastern ports, including New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia; or
immediately transmigrated to inland industrial centers such as Chicago, those
who settled in the West arrived gradually and in far smaller numbers. This meant
that, particularly before the turn of the century, even the largest western
Jewish communities remained quite modest. As late as 1915, the Hebrew
Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America reported that over 80 percent of immigrant Jews
were bound for northern and central Atlantic states, and less than 1 percent
for the West. Of those, only a fraction came to the Northwest.
Those who came to Oregon were making a conscious choice to move
outside the normal paths of Jewish life and into the American hinterland. They
were attracted by opportunities that were shaped, in turn, by the distinctive
environment, commercial prospects, and racial landscape of the region. The process
of self-selection among migrants, combined with the particular opportunities
and challenges of the region that they chose, shaped their experiences. They
neither recreated the Lower East Side nor seamlessly blended into the local
white landscape. Rather, they reflected both the Jewish and western forces that
shaped them.