"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.