Located in the New York Public Library’s Steven A. Schwarzman Building, the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library comprises – as very aptly described on the website of the New York Public Library – “…one of the world’s great collections of Hebraica and Judaica.” The geographic, linguistic, ideological, and temporal breadth of the Dorot Division’s holdings allows researchers – whether professional, amateur, or anywhere-in-between – the opportunity to conduct research into most any aspect of the history of the Jewish people, with special emphasis upon the following areas:
Jews in the United States (particularly New York in the age of immigration)
Yiddish Theater
Jews in Israel, through 1948
Jews in early modern Europe, especially Jewish-Gentile relations
Christian Hebraism
antisemitism
…and…
World Jewish newspapers and periodicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Importantly, are assisted by a highly knowledgeable, accommodating, and congenial staff, in – but of course! – a physical setting and geographic locale of singular historical, cultural, and social significance.
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The image below, from Jerome Ryan’s Travel Photos, shows the reading room of the Dorot Jewish Division.
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The Dorot Divison’s collection of Jewish newspapers and periodicals is an unparalleled resource for researching Jewish history in the dual contexts of Jewish military service, and, genealogy. Researchers are provided with requested items in either original; physical – textual – format, or more often microfilm, the latter especially for periodicals and monographs where the original item is too rare or delicate for manual use. For example, all prior (and hopefully future!) posts on this blog covering items in The Jewish Chronicle and l’Univers Israélite (“The Jewish World”) were based on copies made from 35mm microfilm. In terms of copying, there’s sufficient external and internal illumination in the Dorot Division’s research room for digital photography, while the Milstein Microform Reading Room – in Room 119; quite literally “across the hall” from the Dorot Division in Room 111 – has numerous microfilm viewing / reading machines, which allow the creation of digital copies, with a few some temperamental “older” machines providing conventional photocopies.
One of the periodicals I’ve investigated at the Dorot Jewish Division has been the Jewish Frontier, the monthly magazine of the Labor Zionist Movement, which was published from 1934 through 2005. According to the Dorot Division’s catalog record, the Frontier was published by the Labor League for Palestine from 1933 through April of 1938, and commencing in May of 1938 by the Jewish Frontier Association. The Frontier was founded by Hayim Greenberg (also its first editor), Marie Syrkin, and Dr. Haim Fineman, the latter of Temple University in Philadelphia. Eventually, Marie Syrkin succeeded Hayim Greenberg as editor. As stated at the website of Ameinu (the successor organization to the Labor Zionist Alliance), the Jewish Frontier’s, “mission was to explore, advance, and, where appropriate, reshape the humanistic ideas and progressive values that underlie modern Labor Zionist thought and belief.”
My discovery of the Jewish Frontier was fortuitous. I first learned “about” the publication in the book in Gulie Ne’eman Arad’s America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism (Indiana University Press, 2000). The book reviews the response of American Jewry – particularly that of its leadership – to the persecution of Jews within and by Nazi Germany, prior to America’s actual entry into the Second World War. This is framed in the lengthier context of the historical experience of the Jews in the United States, commencing from the mid-nineteenth century, and shows a community (if that word can be used) – particularly its leaders – trapped between competing desires for acceptance by the larger society on the one hand, and, community solidarity on the other. The book sheds invaluable, illuminating, realistic (and perhaps disillusioning…) light on this period of American Jewish history.
Dr. Arad’s book concludes with an excerpt from an essay by Shlomo Katz from the May, 1940 issue of the Jewish Frontier. Entitled “What Shall We Write?”. Katz’s essay discusses the geographic, social and cultural, and ultimately psychological and cognitive “distance” between the Jews of America – particularly among intellectuals and writers – and those of Europe, prevailing among American Jewry shortly before the start of the Second World War.
The excerpt from Katz’s essay, as presented in Dr. Arad’s book, appears below:
The concept of the Jewish people throughout the world as a unit may not be strange to him ideologically; he may even argue in favor of such a concept where political theories are concerned. But personally he has already lost the feeling of unity with the larger whole to a great extent. Only the slimmest cultural and psychic ties bind him to Jews of Poland, Palestine, Germany or Russia. That is why he cannot feel about the tragic fate of the European Jews in the same distant and detached terms as he feels about the fate of the Chinese people, for example. But at the same time he is too far removed from them to be able to identify himself with Polish or German Jews in a personal manner. The immensity of the tragedy appalls him; he feels directly concerned, but not sufficiently to make him a living part of the drama. Between him and the European scene there lie years, years that count in building up one’s personality, of life in America. These years, with all the cultural baggage that was accumulated in them, he does not share with Europe’s Jews; and they stand between him and them.
This was interesting. This meant something. (This means something, still.) This prompted me to look further.
I reviewed issues of the Jewish Frontier published from 1933 through the early 1950s. What I found was, on a consistent basis, superb, compelling writing. A sense of realism: Authors who confronted and described situations as they were. A tempered, moral urgency. A sense of pride. A sense of the need for action.
I do not know what prompted Greenberg, Syrkin, and Fineman to decide upon the title of “Jewish Frontier” for their periodical, but in retrospect, it was very apropos.
Perhaps it was their perception understanding that pre-1948 Yishuv was – in senses physical, spiritual, and psychological – very much a world of the frontier; on the frontier. Perhaps it was to connote that when Avraham Aveinu left Ur and crossed the Euphrates River en route to (then) Canaan, he had crossed over not only a physical boundary, but accepted borders and assumptions of thought and action, to stand alone in his belief in one God. He was alone and undaunted in his faith, on a “frontier” that was not solely physical.
Perhaps it was both.
Presently, none of the content of The Jewish Frontier appears to ever have been digitized. Worthy of being read and pondered even today, in 2017, I hope to present a few essays and articles in future blog posts
For the moment, an appropriate start is the presentation of the full text of Shlomo Katz’s essay of May, 1940.
References
Ameinu, at
http://www.ameinu.net/
Labor Zionist Alliance, at
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/labor-zionist-alliance
New York Public Library, at
https://www.nypl.org/
New York Public Library, Dorot Jewish Division, at
https://www.nypl.org/locations/divisions/jewish-division
New York Public Library, Dorot Jewish Division, Jewish Frontier Catalog Record, at
Jewish Frontier Catalog Record
New York Public Library – Milstein Division of U.S., Local History and Genealogy, at
https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/milstein
Jerome Ryan’s Mountains of Travel Photos, at
http://mountainsoftravelphotos.com/index.html
Abraham the Hebrew, at Ohr Hadash, at
http://thetrugmans.com/673/abraham-the-hebrew/