Ha! a Cincinnati story after all ...

In my last post, I cavalierly announced that I was going to see if I could find Estelle Sternberger, who partnered with Rebekah Kohut in the 1930s to create a Jewish women's encyclopedia, in the Jewish Women in America historical encyclopedia which appeared in 1997. Lo and behold, not only is there an entry on Sternberger, but she was born in Cincinnati! hooray!

Born in 1886, Sternberger attended the University of Cincinnati and the School of Jewish Philanthropy which existed there for a short time. Later, she worked in New York as executive secretary of the National Council of Jewish Women where one of her roles was to gather information about the careers of contemporary Jewish women.

After serving as executive director of World Peaceways and publishing The Supreme Cause: A Practical Book about Peace (1936), she became a radio commentator on politics and culture.

The entry makes no mention of the encylopaedia project, but it is nice to realize that though she never got to create one, she did end up being in one ...

Source: Jessica Berger, "Sternberger, Estelle," in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, eds., Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore (New York, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 1336-7.

an Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women

There have always been American Jewish women who have sought to counter recurring amnesia about the contributions of Jewish women to their religion and society. Rosa Sonneschein's huge effort on this score was the monthly publication The American Jewess which appeared from 1895-1899. The Jewish Women's Archive has worked to ensure that Sonneschein's work is not forgotten by making the full run of that journal available and searchable on-line. The Jewish Women's Archive, itself, of course is only one the latest of public efforts to insist that Jewish women's history not be forgotten. As Sonneschein observed "not what has happened, but what is recorded makes history."

Cincinnati's Every Friday newspaper of May 6, 1932 offers a glimpse of some other women seeking to fight the male-biased trend of history writing by gathering the stories of Jewish women's achievements into bound volumes. The newspaper noted that "Plans for the first comprehensive publication of facts relating to the work of American Jewish womanhood" had been announced by "Jewish Women of America, an organization with headquarters at 103 Park Avenue, New York." The effort was "to take the form of an Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women, with Rebekah Kohut and Estelle M. Sternberg as Editors."

Sternberger, the article notes had resigned as Executive Secretary of the National Council of Jewish women to take up this work. I don't recall hearing of Sternberger before. I do however know something about Rebekah Kohut, and it is in this light that I can feel some satisfaction at learning of this encyclopedia that never, as far as I know, saw the light of day. Kohut, a leading figure in the effort to create new public roles for Jewish women in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries, led a rich and estimable life. In fact, I got to write the article about her that appeared in the marvelous encyclopedia that did eventually get written about American Jewish women.

In 1997, 65 years after Kohut and Sternberger set out to capture the collective experience of "Jewish Women of America," Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore published American Jewish Women: An Historical Encylopedia. That work (and its sequel Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Hyman and Dalia Ofer, now available on CD) has proven to be an incomparable guide to the richness and scope of the story that Kohut and Sternberg wanted to tell in 1932. I'm going to see if I can find Estelle M. Sternberg in it tomorrow morning.

Semitic Beauty

Why can't I resist these beauty contests? In 1932, the Avondale Synagog (Adath Israel) held a Beauty Contest as part of its Synagog Carnival. The winner was Miss Miriam Hyams, a 17-year-old senior at Hughes High School, who was lauded for "upholding the tradition of Semitic feminine beauty." "Semitic feminine beauty"-- I'm going to have to think about that one. I'm currently reading Eric Goldstein's The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity which raises compelling questions about Jewish ambivalence over whether Jewish identity should be thought about as a racial construct (as suggested by "semitic beauty") or as a religious confession. Given that context, it's sort of nice to see the "semitic" pride here. I'm also appreicative of Miriam Hyams' nose in this profile shot featured in Every Friday. It makes me happy that she was the victor ... in a world where "Reading Road Rose" was seeking to ditch her "Reading Road Nose," and Fanny Brice, as shown in the Jewish Women's Archive's movie Making Trouble , was ditching the nose that had already taken her far on Broadway. And, so, although I don't generally admire beauty contest culture, in this case Ive got to give it up both for Miriam and the judges.

Source: Every Friday, April 15, 1932, p. 12.

Capturing the Anguish of Disaster

This is pretty wild. It so happened that in the midst of their 1906 California honeymoon, Cincinnatiians Robert Senior and Fanny Aub Senior found themselves right in the middle of the great San Francisco earthquake.

I have been thinking about how the kind of immediate and personal narrative that Fanny sent to her “dear ones,” as soon as she was out of the ring of seismic destruction would never be replicated today. Who, having undergone such a trauma would write such a detailed and emotive letter today? Anyone wanting to assure their family of their safety and to share the details of their experience would use the telephone rather than the written word (the closest equivalent might be blog accounts written for public, not private, consumption).

Fanny and Robert Senior telegraphed their safety as soon as it was possible, but to share their experience with those they loved, they had no choice but to write a long letter – each of them did so as soon as they could.

I don’t know enough about the history of the quake to know if there is anything unusual about Fanny’s moving and anguished account, assuring her family that the “newspaper accounts” of the disaster “are not one bit exaggerated.” I am, however, pretty sure that no one trying to tell the story of that horrific moment has used Fanny’s and Robert’s letters to help convey the story of those traumatic days, preserved but buried as they are in uncatalogued papers of a Cincinnati Jewish family active in communal affairs. What chance has there been for someone interested in San Francisco to come across these words? I hope there will be more of a chance in the future.

I’ve thought a lot about what is in this letter, but hard as it is for me to shut up, I am just going to present an abridged version of what Fanny wrote without adding my own comments. Her powerful anguished voice deserves to be heard on its own and speaks for itself … I’ve shortened it only because it was 8 pages long ….


Fanny Aub to “My Dear Ones” Salt Lake City, 1906 [American Jewish Archives, Senior Family Papers, Uncatalogued Box 1]

My dear ones,

Thank God! for many a time these last terrible days I thought I should never address you again. It has truly been one long dreadful nightmare which we shall never be able to efface from our memories as long as we live. …. Yes we have more than we can realize to be grateful for, for we escaped uninjured, and are far away from the city of misery. …. With fire, famine, draught [sic] and pestilence, can you conceive of such agony? Newspaper reports are not one bit exaggerated. The horror of it all could never be conveyed to anyone who has not experienced this most awful catastrophe of the age.
I never could describe the first sensation of the earthquake which woke us out of our sleep. It was a jar that sent us three feet into the air, oh: Heaven I’m feeling it all the time and shall wake up many a night with a recurrence of those worst seconds I have ever lived through. Darkness, lightning thunder building, falling, the hotel [?] shaking, pounding, God it was terrible. When it stopped everyone dashed for the streets to find waiting a different sight than we had left the night before. People came down with practically nothing on screaming etc. Well what is the use it only excites me more to talk of it. I’m trying so hard to crowd it all from my mind.
After some hours had passed Bob [her husband]insisted upon our going up to dress so as quickly as possible I tumbled into my clothes, my grey suit skirt, tan coat and hat, all I have left to my name at present. We ran down then, just in time to get another shock much milder than the first of course but still a warning that the gases had not subsided. Then and there I decided never to return to those rooms, the lower part of the hotel had been entirely demolished, that is the plaster had been broken off the walls …. I would not permit Bob to return, and so we did not save many things we might have carried although clothes trunks etc were out of the question. You could not have had them hauled away for any money. I really do not reproach myself though for nobody on earth could tell what the next moment would bring, and our few jewels were not worth the risk to my notion of thinking. So you see all I have left is a little underware [sic] one change for both Bob and myself which a bell-boy brought down to us later in the morning in one of our dress suit cases.
We stayed in the park all day with Rheinstroms, Rothschilds and .. what a day! … the dead lying covered in a heap and the fire in the distance I never want to see such sights again. By four oclock I could stand it no longer and made Bob get a carriage to take us out to Mayfields.”
[She was unable to let her family know they were safe because] “there was no communication anywhere in or out of the city as wiring was an impossibility. Well we started for the ferry with Fred Mayfield one of Bob’s Cousins who had come over looking for his wife, poor fellow, Heaven knows if will ever find her, she was visiting … in the city [ a friend] whose house was burned by the time he got there. It was a longer walk he told us than we had ever taken in our lives so I knew I could not carry more than my coat, it was burning hot. “
[After] a six mile walk up and down almost perpendicular hills …. discouraged all the way down by police who turned us back + people who told us we never could get across , [they reached the train station]… all we could get was 2 uppers for Salt Lake but we clutched them. I can assure you we decided to stand rather than remain in that country another second….
Much love to you all. Do send this such as it is to Clara + Edgar I never could write about it all again.”

Fondly , Fan

"Though your blood ain't so blue ...."

My last post described the parody songs and satires (called “stunts”) that were often performed at New Year’s and other occasions by members of Cincinnati’s German Jewish community. “Reading Road Rose” offered a withering portrayal of the just-out-of-the-ghetto girl with upper-class desires. Today, I’m looking at an untitled composition that mocks the come-one come-all ethos they perceived at the early-twentieth-century Wise Center.

Founded in the 1840s, K.K. B’nai Yeshurun under the leadership of American Reform Judaism’s master builder Isaac M. Wise, became the very model of an American Reform congregation. Like its sister congregation K.K. Bene Israel (Rockdale Temple), it was an impressive bastion of 19th-century German Jewish homogeneity (according to historian Steven Mostov’s careful census study).

When Cincinnati’s affluent Jews began moving up out of the city at the turn of the twentieth century, the congregation maintained the magnificent Plum Street Temple downtown but also built a “Wise Center” on the hilltops to serve as religious school and a gathering and worship site, closer to the homes of most congregants.

Despite their association with German Jews, the growth of most early Reform congregations in the early twentieth century depended upon the growing inclusion of upwardly mobile Russian or Eastern European Jews. In Cincinnati, B’nai Yeshurun was perceived as being much more open to the newcomers than Bene Israel. In 1931, B’nai Yeshurun responded to the pressures of the Depression by merging with the Reading Road congregation, a Reform temple with a more traditionalist orientation and a more eastern European constituency. The merged congregation was renamed the Isaac M. Wise Temple.

With its Zionist rabbi (James Heller who served from 1920 to 1952) and its growing numbers of arriviste members, it seems to have become less attractive to Rose Hill Jews, even those like Robert Senior, who worked actively for Russian Jews (he was president for 25 years of the Bureau of Jewish Education which sponsored the city’s Talmud Torahs). One of his stunts held the Wise Center up for ridicule, suggesting again (like “Reading Road Rose”) the danger that inclusion could pose to the class status of his own community.

If you want to get in, there is one place to begin
At the Center – The Wise Center
Though you’re cross-eyed and fat, there’s a welcome on the mat
At the Center - The Wise Center.
If a man breaks your heart, you can get another start
At the Center – The Wise Center

In addition to letting in all losers who might apply, the Wise Center, according to the song, also subjected itself to ridicule by responding to every possible desire by offering a class or forming “a club for any dub.” But the real lurking danger was in the inclusion offered by the capacious center. Although

“The haughty and proud always come in a crowd
To the Center –the Wise Center,”

they were not exactly barring the door to those of lesser status or merit:

Though your blood ain’t so blue, they will make a place for you
At the Center – The Wise Center.
What you’re worth, what you wear, no one really seems to care
At the Center – The Wise Center.

At Losantiville, the German Jewish country club, the song points out, they still “think you are a pill,” and won’t let you in, but the temple it seems had fallen prey to the dross of annual dues:

“At the Center you get in any day – you pay your dues for they
Don’t care a lot – because they’ve got a melting pot.”

The final verse brings up the same fear of German/Russian miscegenation that haunts “Reading Road Rose.” “Perhaps a boy from Clinton Street [the ‘ghetto’ district downtown] should meet / Some swell girl.” Though he wouldn’t have dared invite her to a show, when they meet

"At the Center, she don’t think he’s got a cheek to speak
On occasion it is said they love and wed.”

If the Clinton Street boy doesn’t go in for nuptials, it is suggested, he might yet go into business with her ‘Pa.' In the end, the song suggests, the inclusion of these upstarts as members of the congregation, the family, or the business, was all about money. A weakening community could not stand up to those who held not equivalent worth, but cold hard cash:

"By the Centers its aufait work or play
Should always pay.”

I’d love to hear what other people think of this song (or of “Reading Road Rose). I’d especially love to hear your guesses as to what popular tune the Wise Center song may have gone to. The closest I can get is the anachronistic “Pettycoat Junction.” (Although Robert Senior often composed his own music to songs he wrote for special occasions, I don’t think that is the case here).

Source: Uncatalogued Box 1, Senior Family Papers, Ms. Coll. 139, American Jewish Archives.

Reading Road Rose ...

It’s really not that surprising that Cincinnati’s German Jews have dominated all previous histories of the city’s Jewish community.. Members of the much larger population of Cincinnati Jews who come from an Eastern European background have rightfully complained about this bias, but there is no denying the compelling quality of Cincinnati’s mid-19th-century Jewish community and its descendants.

Cincinnati’s German Jews created the first central successful national organizations of American Jewish life. They had a huge impact on the cultural and civic life of Cincinnati. And, through many in-marriages, they all seem to be related to each other. Their family names quickly become familiar -- seeming to offer a coherent narrative of Jewish communal development – They easily seduce the historian who can trace the swath they cut through religious and municipal social reform and then even visit them in the Walnut Hills United Jewish Cemetery where so many rest in close and eternal proximity.

Much of my book, like those of my predecessors, will inevitably follow the character and achievements of this community, but I hope also to offer more than just the standard patronizing/patronized historical narrative about the complex relationship of the German and Eastern European (“Russian”) communities.

As the clever celebratory but racist couplet cited in my last post suggested, Cincinnati’s German Jews could play integral roles in every significant social/political reform movement in Cincinnati, but still not escape the prejudices of their times. It turns out that their propensity for clever skits and songs (referred to as “stunts”) over the holiday season (more later on the question of “Christmas”) can offer insight into the German/Russian relationship as well.

Set, apparently, to the tune of “Second Hand Rose,” one new year’s song (sorry, I don’t know the year, but it seems to have been written by Robert M. Senior during the 1920s), portrayed the fortunes of a girl whose Russian father had struggled in America until WWI-related prosperity enabled the family to move uptown to Reading Road in Cincinnati’s largely Jewish neighborhood of Avondale:

“Now I’ve got Reading Road clothes – Reading Road beaux
That’s why they call me – ‘Reading Road Rose”

Rose apparently attracts so much attention that they’ve had to bring in “a new traffic cop” to Avondale, but she’s still not satisfied, because “slightly north” of where she stands

“Lives a smarty set
And they don’t invite me – don’t invite me –yet.”

But don’t worry, she suggests,

“Don’t for a minute suppose, despite my Reading Road nose,
I’ll always be a Reading Road Rose”

With a (German-Jewish) doctor ready to take care of her troublesome facial extremity, she feels prepared to take on the snootier set, to make her mark not only in Avondale, but among the grand and gracious houses and community occupying the streets known as Rose Hill:

“I’ll bridge or dance or wear my new golfing pants
There isn’t a demand I won’t fulfill –
I’ll be coy – or I’ll be chilly, I’ll be sober or gay,
For where there is a will, I’m sure there’s always a way,
Once the crowd knows about this Reading Road Rose,
She’ll be Rosey – of Rose Hill.”

The large family group that gathered together on Rose Hill to enjoy this song, many of whom had devoted countless hours to improving the lot of Cincinnati’s immigrant Jews, clearly felt miles above the social climbing aspirations of Reading Road Rose, but she was also clearly a threat to them. More on this threat and another song ….. in my next post .

Source: Senior Family Papers, Ms. Coll. 139, uncatalogued Box 1, American Jewish Archives.

Ah, history ....

In my last post, I tried to share something of the remarkable efforts of communal activist Setty Kuhn in addressing the needs of her community, ranging across musical, educational, religious, international, and racial concerns.

But ah, history. As much as I admire Setty, it is impossible to simply ignore the troubling social attitudes and certainties -- inherent in her life and that of her community -- that come too starkly into view from our early 21st-century perspective. We are forced to censure those we would admire, with the all too certain awareness that we too, in all our earnestness and/or cynicism, will be brought up short by those who someday may look back at us.

Setty lived in a broad world that spanned continents and communities, but her intimate world was a very narrow one. This world consisted almost entirely of Cincinnati’s German Jewish elite – and she was related by blood or marriage to many of its most prominent members. She was even the founder of the country club that came to define the parameters of this community. It was a community defined both by its love of Christmas and its shared devotion to communal betterment.

Setty Kuhn particularly was recognized for addressing the needs of those less fortunate. As one Cincinnati columnist observed, although she always lived amidst privilege, she chose to use those privileges in the interests of a better world. In pursuing her special passion – housing reform – she became instrumental in the passage of municipal, state, and national legislation to address the growing decay of America’s inner cities and its impact upon the least fortunate.

But yesterday’s cutting edge reforms can become the cramped and destructive forces of today. “Slum eradication” as a way to improve neighborhoods often meant the replacement of human scaled neighborhoods with soulless housing projects that did little to foster opportunity and bred much of the destructive behavior they were meant to prevent. It would be hard to argue that Cincinnati’s housing projects did much to advance the fortunes of the African American population they were intended to serve. An easier argument would be that they worked well in keeping that community segregated and marginalized, while opening space for more of the kind of downtown industrial expansion desired by the municipality.

Setty Kuhn worked harder and with more effectiveness for the broader community (across class, religious, and racial lines) than I shall ever hope to be able to do. Yet the responsible American Jewish historian in me feels the need to make the obvious point that Setty Kuhn grew up in an indelibly racist society. She could not have avoided reflecting these views even as she addressed issues that most individuals in privileged white Cincinnati would have avoided.

Her letters as a young woman deployed the derogatory language and patronizing racial attitudes of the world she lived in. These certainly faded with time, but it’s clear from some of the papers in her collection that the Yiddish word “schwartzer” as a negative term for black people was sustained even within her cultured German Jewish circle.

Let me share one example which is so shocking, I think, not because we live in a society that has driven out racism. Rather, because most of us who would now identify with the political activism and social consciousness embodied by Setty, could never imagine deploying racist terms in the interest of our own amusement. It’s hard even to imagine just how close we are in time and identification to those able to do so quite easily and with great aplomb.

The following comes from one of the many song and tributes written over the years by friends and family in Setty’s honor. This one comes from the last verse of a poem written to mark the 20th anniversary (in 1913) of the marriage of Setty Swarts to Simon Kuhn. Here it is, make of it what you will:

“So Si he knew he’d met his fate,
And they were married soon,
For is it not most proper that,
A Schwartz should wed a Kuhn?”

source: Setty Kuhn Papers, American Jewish Archives