There has been a Jewish presence in the population of the United States of America since the colonial era of the 17th century, although their numbers remained small and these early Jewish communities consisted mainly of Sephardic Jewish immigrants of Spanish and Portuguese origins. More significant Jewish immigration occurred in the 19th century, when Ashkenazi Jews from Germany emigrated to the U.S. By 1880, the U.S. Jewish population stood at about 250,000, but most of these immigrants were educated, secular German Jews who toiled as shopkeepers and merchants (History 1). In the period between 1880 and 1924, more than two million Jews would arrive on American shores, a "distinctive wave of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from poor rural Jewish populations of the Russian Empire and the Pale of Settlement (modern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova)" (History 1). This analysis will discuss why these massive numbers of Eastern European Jews immigrated to the U.S. during this period; including what they faced when they arrived in America and what strategies they relied upon to survive in a new country. A conclusion will address how Jews fare in contemporary American society.
In terms of immigration, there are often push and pull factors that encourage people to emigrate. The Eastern European wave of Jews were primarily poor, rural Jews that were pulled to American shores by the lure of the vast social and economic opportunities available in the U.S. Waves of Jewish immigrants before them had been successful on American shores, where anti-Semitism has always been less pronounced than in Europe. The main push factor driving European Jews by the hundreds of thousands from Eastern Europe was persecution. Violent Russian pogroms against Jews and persecution of Jews in parts of Eastern Europe were responsible for the dramatic wave of Jewish immigrants arriving in the U.S. between the 1880s and 1920s. ...