Afternoon Calisthenics at Woodbine: American Jewish Agriculture and the Male Body

• In Event: American Jews and the Transformations of Masculinity

Abstract

At the turn of the century, the American landscape was dotted with planned Jewish agricultural communities, located across the country from New Jersey to North Dakota to Louisiana. In one sense, they are historically marginal: most of them failed within their first decades. But in another sense, they demonstrate a strong historical current in the negotiations of American Jewish masculinity. The promotion of these cooperative farming enterprises—largely by acculturated American Jews, but also by immigrant farmers themselves—emphasized the rhetoric of physical strength, bodily improvement, and dominion over the land. Bernard Palitz, the superintendent of the Baron de Hirsch Fund-supported Woodbine Colony wrote in 1907 that the agricultural colonies called out to Jews in the “immoral and unhealthy surroundings” of the city: “harden your muscles and broaden your mind!” For Palitz, an acculturated Jewish philanthropist, agricultural communities would show critics that Jews could be strong, manly, productive citizens, and provided the example for other Jews to leave unhealthy cities and develop their bodies and minds.

By the early twentieth century, the idea of the farmer-citizen as paradigmatic American man was a nostalgic artifact, but it still functioned as one idealized path to Americanization. The philanthropists, organizers, and immigrants who created Jewish agrarian communal settings felt that working the land was the best way to become—and demonstrate to others that they were capable of becoming—healthy, robust, and productive American men. Despite other ideological differences, the relationship of working the land, physical strength, and masculinity saturates the archival materials of both immigrant-led and philanthropically-managed communities.

author

• Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University