Исследователь вклада евреев в американское искусство М. Александер

BY THE 1920s a new generation of Jewish children had grown up in America. Many had migrated from Eastern Europe in the great transatlantic waves of 1882, 1891, 1904, and after. Others, though born in the United States, had immigrant parents. Either way, their fathers and mothers had suffered hunger, humiliation, and pogroms in Europe, but this was not the children's experience. Generally they went to American public schools and colleges, found white-collar jobs, escaped the urban ghettos of first settlement for greener places, and entered the middle class. Along the way they built Jewish neighborhoods with their own religious schools and community centers. They established thriving Jewish businesses and even entire industries. They formed a tangible voting block and helped shape public opinion and policy. They also contributed substantially to American cultural production, from popular entertainment to academia. In short, these children were making it in America. Moreso, they were participating in a host society as their ancestors in Galicia, Romania, or the Russian Pale never had.

Jazz Age Jews
Michael Alexander

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7126.html

Arnold Rothstein, gangster and alleged fixer of the 1919 World Series, is our first subject

Next comes politics. Felix Frankfurter, immigrant to the Lower East Side of New York City, had risen about as high in the American aristocracy as anyone could. He was full professor of law at Harvard--and had been since he was thirty-one--and had had the ear of every liberal president since Theodore Roosevelt.

The third case considers the career of Al Jolson, jazz singer and blackface entertainer

Take, for example, the Russian case. According to Eli Lederhendler, scholar of Eastern European Jewry, 95 percent of the Russian and formerly Polish Jewry at the turn of the century lived in the Pale of Settlement, the westernmost area of Russia between the Baltic and Black seas in which Jews were legally bound to reside. Non-Jewish Russians made up less than 5 percent of the Pale's urban population. In 1897, 96.5 percent of Russian Jews stated that their mother tongue was Yiddish. In 1898, 54 percent of all Jewish children in the empire attended traditional Jewish elementary schools rather than Russian schools.