Weekly Reader: Elections and Voting
Published on November 03, 2024.
When Abraham Cahan, the longtime editor of the Forverts newspaper, first arrived in the United States, he was immediately struck by the spectacle of American elections. “The streets were alive with the banners, transparencies, window portraits of rival candidates, processions, fireworks, speeches,” he recalled in his memoir. “I heard scores of words from the political jargon of the country . . . Each day brought me new experiences, fresh impressions, keen sensations.” While Cahan was critical of the unseemly aspects of American democracy—buying and selling votes on the street was not an unheard-of practice in those days—he rated it as far superior to the repressive political environment he had left behind in Russia. With our own election day swiftly approaching, let’s take a look at how Yiddish speaking Jews have viewed this quintessentially American experience.
—Ezra Glinter, Senior Staff Writer and Editor
Guides for the Perplexed
For Cahan and his fellow immigrants, one of the first things they had to learn upon arriving in their new country was how to participate in elections and other aspects of American life. Fortunately, they had guides to help them. Yiddish citizenship guides, published by organizations such as the National Council of Jewish Women and the Daughters of the American Revolution, taught them about the structure of the US government and their rights and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy. Other resources, such as Cahan’s own “Bintel Brief” advice column, offered guidance on every type of problem, including landlords, bosses, relatives, wayward husbands, and ungrateful, English-speaking children.
New Americans
For many newly arrived immigrants, one of the first things they had to figure out was how to become American citizens. This was particularly true after a series of restrictive immigration laws was passed in the mid-1920s, making the process more complicated for the new arrivals. Here too they had resources to help them. Booklets with titles like “How to Take Out Your First Papers” guided the new immigrant through the process of applying for American citizenship and taught the necessary English language skills to successfully complete the paperwork.
The Big Day
Countless Yiddish writers, including Cahan, attested to the excitement with which Yiddish-speaking immigrants approached election day. For many of them it was their first opportunity to participate in the democratic process, and the experience never got old. In this oral history interview, Arlene Cohen Stein, a writer and retired music teacher in Utica, New York, describes the excitement of election day in her family when she was a child.
Fiercely Fought
Then as now politics was something of a contact sport, waged at home, on the street, and in the local deli. In this oral history interview, Eli Kwartler, Jewish Community of Amherst co-president, recalls his father reading Yiddish newspapers and discussing politics in Brooklyn delis.
Watch an oral history interview with Eli Kwartler
Jewish Politics
While Jews were always keen participants in American political life, does that mean that there was a Jewish politics? While Jewish leaders used to insist that there was no such thing as “Jewish politics” in the United States, historian Jonathan Sarna argues otherwise. In his 2021 Melinda Rosenblatt lecture, Sarna explores the long and significant history of “Jewish politics” and the ways in which they have shaped both Jewish identity and American politics over the past 150 years.