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Reviews
Family of Strangers: Building a Jewish Community in Washington State
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By Molly Cone, Howard Droker, and Jacqueline Williams
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2003. Photographs, notes, index. 407 pages. $45.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by Jeanne Abrams
Penrose Library, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado
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| Due in part to the so-called ethnic revolution of the 1960s and the resultant American preoccupation with exploring family and community roots, local Jewish history has gained a new prominence over the past several decades. A parallel phenomenon has been historians' recognition of the important role of religious and ethnic groups in understanding the larger American experience. Family of Strangers: Building a Jewish Community in Washington State is one of the newest of many books that have emerged to document the Jewish presence in the West. As Molly Cone, Howard Droker, and Jacqueline Williams demonstrate, while Washington's Jews often followed the familiar path taken by their co-religionists in many other communities across the United States, many of their experiences were unique. The writing of American Jewish history is rife with both promise and pitfalls. Happily, the authors have been largely successful in their attempt to chronicle the colorful story of Washington's Jews while putting their individual experiences into a broader historical perspective. |
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Although Jews made up only a tiny part of Washington's population, they had a significant impact on the economic, social, political, and religious life of the state, beginning in the 1850s with the arrival of German-speaking Jews from Western Europe. Early Jews were prominent as mayors in several cities, and German-born Edward Salomon served as Washington's territorial governor in 1870. Other German Jews became highly visible entrepreneurs and businessmen, and not surprisingly, many of the women were active in local society and communal functions. Before long, Eastern European Jewish immigrants joined these early Washington pioneers, who exhibited mixed feelings toward their "Russian cousins." As time passed, however, the latter group also became prominent members of the community. Both German and Eastern European Jews were confronted with unprecedented opportunities as well as many challenges in the United States and strove to maintain their identities as both Jews and Americans. |
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Jews settled in small towns and cities throughout Washington; but by the turn of the century, Seattle was clearly the center of the state's Jewish life, with multiple synagogues, kosher bakeries, and kosher butcher shops. One of the most unique aspects of the Jewish community in Washington was its significant Sephardic population, which clustered predominantly in Seattle at the turn of the century. Jewish organizations and institutions also soon abounded in Tacoma, Olympia, and even tiny hamlets such as Bellingham, Everett, and Aberdeen. According to the authors, because the Jewish population of Washington was so small, dissension among German, Eastern European, and Sephardic Jews was often magnified in the early years, fading only after several generations. By the turn of the twentieth century, Seattle hosted seventeen Jewish congregations and another twenty were scattered around the state, a testimony to increasing diversity as well as continued vitality. |
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Family of Strangers is a valuable resource for both historians and a popular audience. The authors rely on an impressive array of manuscripts, oral histories, and newspapers to provide fascinating stories of the people and organizations that created a vibrant community. The individual chapters are carefully footnoted, and the volume is also handsomely illustrated with photographs that enhance the story and help make the individuals come alive. Cone, Droker, and Williams have developed the history of an important local Jewish community within a framework that extends beyond the borders of Washington state and reaches back into Europe and early America. Given the plethora of local Jewish community studies published over the past quarter century, however, it would have been helpful to see the story of Seattle's Jews compared and contrasted with others such as Los Angeles, Denver, or Portland. Despite this drawback, Family of Strangers contributes another valuable strand to the complex and varied tapestry that we know as the North American Jewish experience. |
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