As one historian notes, "Over two million Jews would flee the pogroms of the Russian Empire to the safety of the US from 1881-1924" (History 1).
While the Jews had faced persecution and anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism, despite a significant degree of discrimination against Jews at the time, was less prevalent in the U.S. A majority of the Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe would settle on the East Coast, primarily in New York City and neighboring regions like New Jersey and Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). Because of their numbers, Jews from Eastern Europe on the East Coast of the U.S. represented "one of the world's major concentrations of Jewish population" (History 1). Because of their numbers, the Jews were not welcomed with open arms in many instances.
The enormous wave of immigration between 188
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