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Immigration to the Golden Land: Jewish Life in America
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| Immigrants on deck en route to the United States (Library of Congress) |
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Learning Activity 3: Mass Immigration 1880-1924
1. Distribute the handout Mass Immigration (PDF). Have the full class view the multimedia presentations  Mass Immigration: Coming to America, Mass Immigration: Tenement Life, and Mass Immigration: Building Community, and read the document Jewish Immigration from Eastern Europe. Students should then record their answers to the following questions from the handout:
- What countries did these Jews come from?
- Why did they move to America?
- Where did these Jewish immigrants settle?
After locating the home countries of these immigrants on the Atlas: US, 1789-1925, students should examine the facts of their new existence in America by considering the following:
- Describe tenement life.
- In what ways did Jews establish new communities?
- How many Jews came to America during this time?
- In which years did the largest number of immigrants arrive?
- What major events happened in the world during those years?
- Is there is a correlation between world events and the number of immigrants to the United States? Why or why not?
2. Next, students will look at various documents to further examine some of the experiences Jews had during this time. Divide the class into small groups and distribute the handout Mass Immigration - Historical Documents (PDF). Have each group read and examine two of the following documents:
Have them answer the following questions for each document:
- Who wrote the document? What was his or her point of view? How is this evident in the document?
- Who is the intended audience? What evidence in leads you to believe this?
- What is the tone of the document? Is it telling a story, or trying to persuade someone to believe a point of view?
- Why was this document written? Use examples to support your answer.
- What does this document tell you about Jewish life in America during this period?
3. After students record the discussions of their group, each group should report to the class as whole about their documents. As a class, discuss these different experiences, paying particular attention to the following questions:
- When did the immigrants experience discrimination?
- When were they accepted as part of their communities?
- How was life in America different from life in their homelands?
- How did they maintain their religion while living in this country?
- What are some examples of them breaking away from religious traditions?
- How were the experiences of these immigrants similar to and/or different from those of earlier Jewish immigrants to this country?
Research Extension for Mass Immigration
Using what they have learned during this lesson, students can put together a photo album with captions that detail the life a Jewish immigrant. They can create a "biography" of a person and illustrate it with photos or drawn pictures that highlight key events in his or her life. Images can be obtained on the Internet. Some useful sites:
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
http://www.tenement.org
(On this site, the experiences of a Sephardic family are featured. Teachers may want to extend students' learning experiences by having them research Sephardim and compare the experiences of Sephardic Jews with those of Ashkenazi Jews.)
Photographs from the Chicago Daily News (Library of Congress)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/ichihtml/cdnhome.html
Daguerreotype Portraits and Views (Library of Congress)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/daghome.html
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America (Library of Congress)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/detroit/dethome.html
Metzker, I. (ed.), The Bintl Brief: Sixty Years of Letters From the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (New York: Schocken Books/Random House)
Spewack, B., Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY)
Calof, R., & Rikoon, J.S., (ed.), Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (Indiana: Indiana University Press)
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 Continue to Synthesis of First Three Lessons
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