Jewish New York, Part II: The Refugee Crisis

For centuries, the majority of the world's Jews had lived in small towns called shtetls in the countryside of Eastern Europe. These were isolated, tight-knit communities where the Torah reigned supreme. By the late 19th century, dissatisfaction had been growing among younger Jews about the poverty, the antisemitism, the lack of opporunity, and the narrow-mindedness of the shtetls. Then, in 1881, a series of violent pogroms broke out in Ukraine, forcing thousands of Jews to flee first to major cities nearby and then to America. This exodus only picked up steam in the coming decades as the long-simmering desire to leave the shtetls boiled over. In total, more than three million Jews fled Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914, and the bulk of them ended up in New York City. Here, they were crammed into tiny tenements where they worked long hours sewing garments to stay alive. In this episode, I'll attempt to humanize this story by giving a detailed account of what the journey to America, and the new lives the immigrants established there, were like.