Stephen Birmingham - The Rest of Us: The Rise of Americas Eastern European Jews

The Rest of Us

The Rise of Americas Eastern European Jews

Stephen Birmingham

For Harry Sions in memory

Contents

Preface

It was not my intention when I decided to write this book to write a book that would merely be about rich people. There are some readers, of course, who will argue that this is what the book has become, since our American society inevitably measures success in dollars. But I was actually thinking of Americas Eastern European Jews in terms of another kind of successa social success, that of a mass migration of millions of people who have managed to become, within the lifespan of a single generation, an essential part of our social fabric and civic landscape.

The Jewish immigrants who came to America between 1881 and 1915 seemed, at first glance, to be culturally unadaptable: poor, hungry, ill-clothed, often sickly, speaking no English and in some cases illiterate, they were also steeped in a religious tradition that even Americas older-established Jews considered barbaric and bordering upon fanaticism. Politically, they burned with ideas that most Americans had been taught were radical and dangerous. No culture could have seemed more alien to our shores. What could possibly be done with these people, these benighted escapees from a distant, despotic land? How and where would they ever fit in?

And yet, barely a hundred years later, here they areas people of prominence and influence in every major American city, and in nearly every walk of life. They have survived anti-Semitism from both Christians and fellow Jews. And they have prosperedin a wide-ranging spectrum of businesses from Wall Street to Hollywood, as well as in science, education, politics, the professions, and the artsand their prosperity has contributed to the prosperity of America at large. Theirs has been a success story in what the sociologists call assimilation.

It would be simplistic to say that this is a story that could have happened only in America. America did not offer the Eastern Europeans much of anything to begin with, beyond a chance to be lucky. But, with the inner resources these Jews were possessed of, that chance was enough. Throughout the world, and throughout history, Jews had been punished and persecuted whenever and wherever they seemed to outstep their bounds and threaten, economically, the Christian majority. In fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal, the Catholic monarchs expelled the Jews simply because they had become too important, too necessary. Similar Christian illogic was behind the czarist pogroms of Russia. For a time, for instance, Russian Jews were permitted to be bartenders and innkeepers, and to work in the liquor trade. But when they proved to be good at it, and prospered at it, allegations arose that the Jews were plotting to take over Russia, using vodka as a weapon to befuddle innocent Russian Christian minds, and a harsh reaction followed. Fears that Jews were usurping more than their rightful share of Europes money and power were also behind Hitlers grisly plan to cleanse Europe of its Jews. But in America, to its credit, as the Russian Jews prospered, this did not happen, though there were plenty of mutterings of too much Jewish power from certain quarters. It didnt happen, perhaps, because we are a nation of immigrants, a nation of gamblerswhat greater gamble is there than immigration itself?and in our hearts we all believe that everyone deserves that chance to be lucky, and this is what we mean when we talk about freedom.

But when assessing the success of the Eastern European Jews in the United States, it is important to keep matters in perspective, and to remember that for all their financial prosperity no American Jewish families have ever come remotely close to equaling the fortunes of the wealthiest non-Jews. The canard that Jewish money dominates the country is just that. No American Jew has ever amassed a personal fortune equal to that of, say, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, or Howard Hughes. Among contemporary non-Jewish families, the Mellon and du Pont families are each worth between three and five billion dollars. The Getty and Daniel K. Ludwig families are worth between two and three billion, and the Rockefellers between one and two billion.

By contrast, the richest Jewish family in America is the Pritzker family of Chicago, collectively worth between seven hundred million and one billion dollars. The founding father, Nicholas J. Pritzker, came from Kiev at age nine in 1880, in the first wave of Russian immigrants. The basis of the family fortune is Chicago real estate, which Pritzker began acquiring in the early 1900s when the city was still young and raw. Never sell your landlease it, was his advice to his sons, and they followed it. Today, the Pritzker real estate holdings are worth, conservatively, half a billion dollars, and other Pritzker investments include Hyatt Hotels, the Cerro-Marmon Corporation, the Hammond Organ Company, the W. F. Hall Printing Company, Continental Airlines, and a number of trucking companies. The Chicago law firm of Pritzker and Pritzker has no clients other than itself, and has not accepted a new client in over forty years because of potential conflicts of interest with the familys other, far-flung enterprises.

The second-wealthiest Jewish American family is that of the late Samuel Irving Newhouse of New York, who, with his two sons, built a communications empire worth between six and seven hundred million dollarstwenty-one daily newspapers, five magazines, six television stations, and twenty cable-television systems. The patriarch of this family fortune was born in 1895 on New Yorks Lower East Side, the eldest of eight children of Russian and Austrian immigrants. Though Newhouse was in the business of pleasing the reading and viewing public, he had no use for personal publicity. Invited many times to be listed in Whos Who in America, he refused to fill out the necessary forms. He was, however, intensely devoted to the welfare of his relatives, and was one of the most nepotistic of American employers. At one point, some sixty-four Newhouse sons, brothers, cousins, and in-laws were on the Newhouse payroll. His most visible philanthropic gift has been the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at New Yorks Lincoln Center, honoring his wife.

Next in line in the roster of Eastern European fortunes in America is that of Walter Annenberg and his seven sisters. Since the stock of Triangle Publicationsthe parent corporation that publishes TV Guide, Seventeen, the Philadelphia Daily News, and the Daily Racing Form, and that owns six television and nine radio stations, plus twenty-seven cable-TV franchiseshas long been family held, the size of the Annenberg fortune has long been a matter of guesswork, but is probably in the three- to four-hundred-million-dollar range. To make sure that his private golf course at Sunny lands, his four-hundred-acre estate outside Palm Springs, would always have water, Walter Annenberg bought the local water company. Though Annenberg and his wife are solidly respectable citizenshe a former ambassador to the Court of St. Jamess, she a former U.S. chief of protocol, and both friends of Presidents Nixon and Reaganthe family fortune is clouded by its founder, Walters father, the late Moses L. Annenberg, who made his money from a telegraphic news service for bookie joints that carried information between racetracks across the country. In 1939, the senior Annenberg was convicted of income tax evasion, fined eight million dollars, and sentenced to three years in prison.