On Thursday, May 15 at 7 p.m., Federation welcomes Hasia R. Diner, a preeminent scholar of American Jewish history and immigration, whose book Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and the Jews in America sheds light on the mutually beneficial, although sometimes fraught, relationship between two immigrant groups with an outsized impact on the United States.

This free program will be presented via Zoom. Register on the calendar of events page at jewishberkshires.org. Part of Jewish Literary Voices: A Federation Series in collaboration with The Jewish Book Council

In Opening Doors, Hasia Diner details how Jewish and Irish immigrants worked together to secure legitimacy in America at the turn of the 20th century. The book draws from historical sources to dispel the popular belief that these groups regarded one another with open hostility, fiercely competing for limited resources and even coming to blows in the crowded neighborhoods of major cities. Diner shows the prevailing relationships between Jewish and Irish Americans were overwhelmingly cooperative, and the two groups were dependent upon one another to secure stable and upwardly mobile lives in their new home.

Hasia Diner is a professor of American Jewish History and former chair of the Irish Studies program at New York University. She is the author of numerous books on Jewish and Irish histories in the U.S., including the National Jewish Book Award-winning We Remember with Reverence and Love, which also earned the Saul Veiner Prize for most outstanding book in American Jewish history.

The BJV Interview: Hasia R. Diner

When Professor Diner spoke to the Berkshire Jewish Voice in April, she shared some background about the relationship between Irish and Jewish immigrants to set up some of the themes of her May 15 program. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.

The book starts by detailing how the Irish started to immigrate to the United States in the 1840s, and Jews from Eastern Europe started coming in earnest in the 1880s. Please describe a bit of the dynamic that occurred when the two groups started to interact.

When the large-scale Jewish migration begins to crest on the shores of the United States, most Jews went to large cities. In every one of those large cities, they saw on the ground another group [the Irish] that had built very dense, active communities that were politically and culturally-engaged– a group that offered a model of how to be an immigrant group in an American society. That was interesting in and of itself, but more central to the book is that those Irish immigrants and their children had come to occupy some key institutions in American life. They came to not only occupy them, but to dominate them. These were specifically the kinds of places that were important for the new Jewish arrivals, all of whom were permanent immigrants to the United States. These are key institutions that they needed in order to foster – I'm not going to call it assimilation because I don't even know what that word means – but integration and economic mobility.

After the English migrations of earlier centuries, do the Irish represent the first ethnic group to make a large-scale immigration to America? Did they create the roadmap of how an immigrant population can thrive in the United States?

Germans come at the same time as the Irish and are actually the single largest ethnic group or immigrant group to come to United States. But Germans were totally divided. They were Catholic, they were Lutheran, they were evangelical, they were socialist, atheist. And so, while they founded very large and thriving communities in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and so on, they did not have the same coherence as the Irish communities. And yes, the Irish come to create the roadmap that all other immigrants were going to follow in one way or another, or as best as they could, because obviously, others come under different circumstances and have other issues. But the Irish set the standard of what it meant to be a white European ethnic group in the United States.

Was the potato famine the primary driver of migration from Ireland or was there a pipeline from Ireland to the US?

The famine obviously very important, but not the explanatory factor. The Irish migration continues for decades after the famine [because of] the continued poverty [in Ireland] and the lack of opportunities for young people – particularly, although not exclusively, young women. Ireland was a place that experienced no industrial development in the latter part of the 19th century. It was a place [that experienced] a massive population loss. It was a pretty inauspicious place for a young person who wanted to ‘make it’ – they couldn't stay home. They had to leave. They don't go just to the United States, although that was the most attractive destination. Vast numbers go to other parts of the British Isles, to England, Scotland. They have a huge flow to Australia. But it was the United States that became the center of Irish global politics and, let's call it, diaspora life.

You point out both the Irish and the Jews who came here – and most immigrants at the time – had was no real thought of going back.

The Italians go back – a huge number, more than a third of all Italian immigrants who came to the United States go back. [But the Irish and Jews] basically never do. So, they are the two most permanent groups to settle in the United States.

Many of the Irish people came over were laborers or domestic servants, but they also found their way to very influential positions of political power in the urban areas. How were those opportunities recognized? Was it simply that there were enough Irish immigrants becoming citizens who could vote them in, or was there another strategy to installing themselves in these positions?

They had numbers on their side. Places like New York and Boston were majority Irish, and they took advantage of the fact that they were staying – they became naturalized, they became citizens, and their numbers worked for them. They came knowing English, unlike essentially any other immigrant group, so that their ability to learn what it took was pretty breathtaking. They also arrived in a context where they were despised, and they used the fact of their being despised as a rallying cry for both communal solidarity and asserting themselves politically.

And a lot of these Irish were also, I imagine, from rural areas, so that their success in the urban environment is that much more impressive.

Definitely impressive, given that these were not people who had lived in cities before. Again, it's just a really interesting matter of timing. They came as American cities began to expand geographically, annexing new areas on the periphery as cities were beginning to lay electric lines and gas lines and paved roads and create urban transportation systems. In the cities and beyond, other industrial sectors were really important and all those things need people to do the work. And the Irish were there to provide the manpower to make American cities.

A question about what proved to be a barrier to both Irish upward mobility is the white Anglo-Saxon protestants who may have considered themselves as the founders and the keepers of the true flame of America. I thought it was very interesting how you write about how after the Irish gained political influence in the cities, they were still scorned by the WASPs, but all of a sudden they had a lot of power over them, as well as on how business was done, how life was lived. Can you tell me a little bit about that relationship?

I generally don't use the word ‘WASPs,’ but the white Protestants hated the Irish and despised Catholicism. They thought Catholicism was completely incompatible with American values. The [reaction to the] Irish caused the creation of a powerful xenophobic third political party, the Know Nothings, a party bent on diminishing Irish political power. This white native-born Protestant group – some of them very elite, some not – saw the Irish as degraded: they were drunken, they were stupid, they were happy-go-lucky and non-industrious. Everything about them was wrong. So, where they could, [white Protestants] kept them out. I think it's ironic that as the Irish arrived in many of these cities, many of the white Protestants left. They don't want to live in the same city with [the newcomers] and they began to suburbanize, which only encouraged and stimulated even greater Irish migration.

There was an earlier wave of Jewish immigration, mostly from Germany. It was more established in the cities, and that they did try to help their fellow Jews as they came here. But as you put it, the Irish “made up the difference” between what the Eastern European Jews needed and what the German Jews were not able to provide. What do you mean by that?

Those Jews who were in the United States a generation, who are already Americans, were very generous and very active in trying to create helping institutions for the new immigrants. They created a whole range of programs, projects, and so on, to help. But what they could do was so little compared to what the Jewish immigrants needed. What they gave was not at all focused on empowering the new Jewish immigrants. They just didn't see that as the route to take and did nothing, essentially, to address the inequities of the class system. In large part, that was because many of those [established] Jews were actually the employers of the new Jewish immigrants. They certainly didn't want to improve the inequities of the class system because it was to their advantage to employ the new immigrants at the lowest wages in the most abject conditions.

How did these Jews and the Irish encounter each other in the cities?

Well, the first encounters are on the street corners and in apartment buildings and in the ordinary ways in which people meet each other and interact and come in contact with strangers. A lot of literature and memoirs make a great deal about how Irish bully boys beat up Jews. Certainly, that happened, but for the most part, they got along in the spaces where they interacted. It was a shared understanding of what it meant to be poor. And one group was Catholic, one group was Jewish – they had no interest in changing each other's religion, but they managed to muddle along in an unselfconscious way as neighbors might. They didn't become best friends, although there were actually quite a few marriages between Irish and Jews. But it was mostly, ‘they're here, we're here, we have some common needs.’

Education was even more formative – by the time the Jews come, Irish women, the daughters of Irish immigrants, were the majority of the school teaching force in every big city. So, they're the ones who teach Jewish immigrant kids.

Was there any resentment between the two ethnic groups as one might be perceived to be doing better than the other or the other having more power than the other?

Well, certainly individuals articulate that. But the Jews and the Irish enter into this alliance, but not with the goal of becoming best friends. They perceived all sorts of differences, but they needed each other. Yes, there's all sorts of resentment in one way or another, but the level of that resentment was no barrier to the Jews asking for favors and the Irish granting them.