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American Jewry was largely an age mate of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Some of the salient characteristics of the larger society in the decades after 1870 enabled a growth and development that allowed America to emerge in the early twentieth century as a major center of global Jewry. In those years a set of circumstances came together that made possible the formation, growth, and maturation of the largest, freest, and institutionally richest Jewish community in the world and indeed in history. 1 Although Jews had been living in the United States (and before that the British colonies of North America) well before the 1870s, they numbered that year no more than approximately 200,000 individuals, and they constituted too small a percentage of the American population and lived with too great a degree of anonymity to make much of an impact or impression on their American neighbors. Nor did they do much to fashion institutions and practices that distinguished them from their co-religionists in Europe. At the beginning of the Gilded Age, American Jews did little to mold the events and trends that made Jewish history.
The 1870s coincided with the beginnings of the mass migration, primarily although not exclusively from shifting regions within eastern Europe, and from this date, the state of affairs began to change. By the 1920s, the three million Jews in the United States--concentrated heavily in America's largest cities, New York in particular--could not be said to be unnoticeable on the American scene, nor did they avoid behaviors that drew attention to themselves as a distinctive element in the population. Likewise, in this half-century they no longer felt compelled to adhere to a set of religious and communal practices that mirrored those of their sisters and brothers who had remained on the other side of the Atlantic or who lived in a range of other new places. Their economic, political, religious, and social patterns became the stuff of discussion by Americans, and they emerged, particularly after World War I, to become central power brokers in world Jewish politics.
I do not want to use this article as a platform from which to focus on the ways in which the Gilded Age and Progressive...