Spotlight
Interviews with authors of new books on migration and mobility
Conor McCutcheon interviews Hasia R. Diner about the book Forged in America: How Irish-Jewish Encounters Shaped a Nation (NYU Press, 2024)
About the author
Hasia R. Diner is Professor Emerita at the Departments of History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. She is the former series editor for our Goldstein-Goren series in American Jewish History. Among her many books are Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, and Immigration: An American History, with Carl Bon Tempo.
About the interviewer
Conor McCutcheon is a 4th year PhD Student at the NYU Department of Sociology, and is also affiliated with the NYU Shanghai Center for Applied Social and Economic Research. His work concerns the intersection of globalization and inequality, with a focus on the ways in which shifting ideas of nationhood and the increase in interstitial transnational spaces are changing the way that people think and act.
Conor: I want to start with a fundamental premise of the book: your argument that writing the history of ethnic groups in tandem is not something that is done very often and that this neglects a large portion of the actual story. Where did this idea come from for you?
Hasia: In 2017, I was the acting director of Ireland House, otherwise known as the Glucksman Ireland House. The story of Ireland House is that the donors and the founders and the conceivers were a couple: Lewis Glucksman, who was Jewish, and his wife, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, who was Irish-American. She had been kind of lukewarm about being Irish until she met Lou, who loved Ireland. So it was funny. He was the one who kind of reinvigorated, or invigorated her Irish consciousness! And since it was the 25th anniversary, the people here decided that the year's programming would be devoted to the Irish-Jewish encounter in America, like Lou and Loretta. Since I was the director, I was sort of forced into thinking about the subject, and largely the history of the meeting between the Irish and the Jews in America, which has been written as a history of Irish-American antisemitism…but when I started preparing for the talk, what I found was very different; not that it hadnt happen, because it obviously did, but there's another story. And it seemed to me that there are these two stories. They both happened, and the one that I wanted to write, or that I did write, was actually much more formative. Whereas, yes, there were these people in Irish America who were antisemites, but the kinds of interactions and connections that I wanted to write about made a real difference in a way the others did not.
Conor: I'd love to know some in-depth information on how that process emerged, the conceiving of the book and the process of discovering the connections within Irish and Jewish histories.
Hasia:
First, I think most immigration and ethnic histories tend to be done in silos. You're studying “Filipinos in Providence,” and that's what you're doing. You learn every kind of ins and outs and wrinkles and details of the Filipinos in Providence, and you may learn a little bit about their relationship to Filipinos in Boston. I'm making that example up, but it’s Filipinos, Filipinos, Filipinos, which is how American Jewish history is written, and it’s really how Irish American history is written.
And when other, let’s say, outsiders, for lack of a better word, come into the story, they're usually cast as antagonists: “They did bad things to us. They said bad things about us. They didn't want us in their schools. They beat us up,” whatever. But the story of Filipinos in Providence is told as a Filipino-Filipino story, and you have no idea of the more complex and nuanced world in which Filipinos in Providence existed.
I don’t know anything about whether there are even Filipinos in Providence, but I do know about New York Jews and New York Irish. They didn't live in a hermetically sealed world. There were multiple ways, times, and venues in which they bumped up against people from different backgrounds, and it wasn’t all bad. They made their own way economically, intellectually, culturally, educationally, and politically, but these were never done alone. They were done in conjunction with others.
For example, the Jewish story is: “We came here, we went into the public schools, and by God, the children of garment workers became doctors”… blah, blah, blah. And then I said, “But who taught them?” Well, they were Irish-American women who were the teachers. But that’s never told.
Conor: So then, after writing this book, how do you think about these groups in relation to each other? What is the kind of “elevator pitch” description of their relationship that you would use to complement the mainstream narratives of these two ethnic histories?
Hasia:
It would have to be a tall building. But the large-scale Jewish migration to the United States took off at the moment when the Irish, the famine generation, had begun to establish themselves in certain key institutions in American life, despite the incredible prejudice against them as Irish and as Catholic.
So, these Jews, who were primarily coming from the Austro-Hungarian and Czarist Empires starting in the 1870s, arrive in American cities, such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and Providence, and what do they see around them? Here is this group of people, the Irish, and they seem to be controlling everything. They learn enough to know that while the bigger machinery of society is operated and controlled by white Protestants, what the Jews actually see are these guys who have control over things that matter deeply to them: getting their kids into school so they don’t have to be garment workers or sweatshop workers or pushcart peddlers. They've never been in a union; they don’t even know what a labor union is. But these guys run the labor unions, and the Jews could use that too.
And in reverse: in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s, the Irish majority in places like New York and Boston is beginning to decline because of mass migration, not just of Jews, but Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. The Irish majority is dwindling, and the Irish realize it’s actually in their interest to reach out to some of these folks to keep themselves in power.
So, for example, Mayor Curley in Boston, the longtime Irish political boss, said in an interview I quote in the book, “I’m actually not interested in the Italians at all. I only want the Jews.” And when asked why, he said, “The Italians go back. They don’t vote. Jews vote.”
For Irish labor leaders, they needed as many workers in Cleveland or Chicago organized as possible, so it was in their interest to reach out and help Jewish garment workers learn how to organize. And the same thing with teachers, the more new immigrant kids there are in the schools, the more they can demand.
It’s not that they loved each other, and that’s one of my points. It is not about love. It’s not multiculturalism. It’s about timing, where the Irish have entered this early stage of power and influence just as the Jews are first arriving. And it’s about place, because it’s about American cities, and the whole ethnic constellation at the time.
For example, the Italians hated the Irish because of what went on in the Catholic Church, but Jews couldn't care less what goes on in the Catholic Church. What language confession is going to be given in was of no interest to them. And the same with the Poles in Chicago, the Polish and the Irish hated each other.
So again: it’s about time, it’s about place, it’s about numbers, and it’s not about looking for people to love each other, but to say, “I need you, and you need me, and therefore…"
Conor: Really fascinating. I think this pragmatism speaks to an interesting conundrum in immigration research in general: sometimes similarities matter in terms of bonding and group interaction, but as you point out, sometimes just enough difference is the right amount, right?
Hasia:
Yeah, and in this context, particularly, because they didn’t step on each other’s toes in the religious sphere, which is obviously very hierarchical, and because there were all these ways in which they really had a lot of different things they could give each other.
Conor: Thanks for taking the time to sit down with me.
Hasia: No problem!
You can purchase the book here.