Jewish Immigration to America
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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
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the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization that the "American gene pool was being polluted by a rising tide of intellectually and morally defective immigrants - primarily from eastern and southern Europe" (Lombardo 2).
The result of Laughlin's "eugenics" studies was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, legislation that based restrictions on race and effectively reduced the annual number of southern and eastern Europeans by 2/3 annually (Lombardo 3). President Calvin Coolidge signed the legislation, arguing "America must remain American," in the first law that set quotas on immigration based on ethnicity and race or eugenics (Lombardo 3). The law was particularly designed to reduce the number of allegedly "dysgenic" Italians and Eastern European Jews whose numbers grew dramatically prior to the enactment of the law (Lombardo 3). Laughlin's work on eugenics and classification of some ethnic groups as "undesirables" would be advanced in principle by racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who often used wording and excerpts from the 1924 Act to affirm racial purity of whites and the inferiority of other ethnic groups like the Jews or African Americans (Lombardo 3).
Despite th
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1404
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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