Nativism Twinned: Jews and Indians in America, 1924

• In Event: Twentieth-Century American Jews as Activists

Abstract

This paper examines the ways that American Jews made rhetorical appeals to Native Americans as they fretted over America’s nativist xenophobia in the 1910s and 1920s. The National Origins Act, passed in May 1924, effectively halted Jewish immigration to the United States. Just one month later, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, generally understood by historians as an effort to erase Indian difference through assimilation, a symbolic act of inclusion that in fact stripped Indians of legal room to maneuver for political sovereignty. These two acts of legislation aimed to serve parallel ends. One was designed to repel the threat of foreign contamination by immigrants from abroad, while the other hoped to dissolve the alien within by absorption.

American Jews and Native Americans both felt their exclusion from the mainstream American body politic; both feared that white America’s assimilatory aspiration for them would lead to their cultural obliteration. This paper argues that Indians provided Jews with a useful and malleable rhetorical tool for confronting tensions around the themes of assimilation and disappearance, naturalization, citizenship, and the idea of “adoption” versus naturalization. Jews took advantage of the flexibility of both “the Jew” and “the Indian” in racial hierarchies in the first quarter of the twentieth century, as Americans became ever more preoccupied with race thinking and its implications for national policy.

This scholarship fits into a number of scholarly conversations – none of which have examined this material – though three in particular stand out: scholarship on Jewish efforts to promote open immigration to the U.S. from the 1900s through WWII; Jewish engagements with other American minority groups in the early 20th century; and 20th century American racism.

Author

• David S. Koffman, York University