Since then, as members of the Shayevich family have settled in different cities, they have also settled across the political spectrum. Bela’s grandparents, who spoke little English and remained dependent on Russian-language media, became Republicans. “They went the way that Russian radio wanted them to go, to the right, citing Israel,” says Bela. After Sept. 11, her father, Vadim, veered left, to the point of criticizing houseguests for wearing flag pins. “‘You used to hang a picture of Lenin there, why are you bringing your patriotic propaganda into my house?’” he asked one Polish immigrant. “The jingoism was for him too reminiscent of totalitarianism,” Bela says.

In becoming a liberal Democrat, Vadim Shayevich is in the minority of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Two waves of Russian-Jewish immigration have arrived in the United States fleeing totalitarianisms of sorts—one czarist, one communist. The first learned on the Lower East Side to mix its American patriotism with different flavors of liberalism and internationalism. The 1990s, Brighton Beach generation, not so much. Soviet Jews have generally embraced right-wing American and Israeli identities that would have left early 20th-century Lower East Siders cold. Phrased in the “Russian reversal” humor made famous by Odessa Jew Yakov Smirnoff, “In Russia, Jews loved the right-wing Republicans; in America, right-wing Republicans love Russian Jews!”

***

In July 1898, in the midst of America’s brief war with Spain, the Lithuanian-born Lower East Side writer and editor Abraham Cahan published his famous Atlantic Monthly essay “The Russian Jew in America,” which argued that Russian Jews were becoming patriotic Americans and deserved the trust and acceptance of their fellow citizens. For the first time in its history, the United States that summer was gripped by a modern, militaristic chauvinism. So strong was the red, white, and blue fervor for the crusade against Spain that it briefly occluded the nativist backlash that had been building against heavy immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The fever of ’98, fueled by the yellow press and marauding Patriotic societies, focused the national mind on “dastardly Dagoes,” as Spaniards were referred to, with a vengeance. Everyone else was, for the moment, off the hook.

Cahan, a refugee from the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II, knew an opportunity when he saw one. He seized upon the war hysteria to advance the cause of his fellow Jews newly arrived from the Russian Empire—an emigration of 2 million destined to displace the Irish famine exodus as the largest in history. In 1898, Russian Jews needed all the help they could get. Gentiles and Americanized Jews alike had become increasingly vocal in decrying the Ostjuden as a threat to social cohesion (not to mention the social acceptance attained by earlier waves of Jews). The Yiddish-speaking refugees were, in the representative judgment of one Midwestern Jewish publication, “superstitious and uncouth Asiatics.” And so Cahan did what any smart ethnic advocate would do in wartime: He waved the flag ’til it hurt.

“The Jewish immigrants look upon the United States as their country, and now that it is engaged in war they do not shirk their duty,” wrote Cahan, who the previous year had founded the Jewish Daily Forward. “They have contributed three times their quota of volunteers to the army, and they had their representatives among the first martyrs of the campaign.”

To bolster his case for Russian Jews, Cahan pointed to voting patterns that showed the Lower East Side to be among the least corrupt ethnic wards in New York. This was true; it was also beside the point. By the late 1890s, socialism had replaced Tammany as the bogeyman haunting nativist dreams. Twenty years before the Bolshevik Revolution, Jews were closely associated in the American mind with radicalism and subversion—a race of Emma Goldmans. This fear would contribute to the U.S. government’s decision to tighten the immigration spigot during the 1920s.

Looking back, fears over Jewish radicalism were overblown. The “red Jews” of the Lower East Side never came close to fomenting revolution in America. Instead, they published some radical newspapers and elected a handful of socialist state assemblymen, plus a judge or two. Cahan’s plea for their patriotism today reads like the journalistic equivalent of a tenement museum, with many of the people he described learning a trade and becoming successful capitalists. Some of his grandchildren would even go on to lead a conservative counterrevolution against the legacy of the immigrant-hero FDR. Indeed, right-wing descendants of the first wave of Russian Jews are now scattered wide enough to supply Adam Sandler with an album’s worth of material without even mentioning Norman Podhoretz: Lillie Friedman raised Geraldo Rivera on her favorite Slavic dish/and don’t forget Sly Stallone’s mama, born Jacqueline Labofish.

But overall the legacy of the first wave of Russian Jewry tilts left. Most of their offspring became committed Democrats, with a dwindling overlap of gestural socialists. It would take a second wave of Russian Jews, arriving decades later and from the other side of the Russian Revolution, to bring a significant number of right-wing Jews to America.

The symbol of this second exodus is, of course, Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood whose revival during the 1980s is credited to the tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian Jews who settled there and recreated Odessa on the Atlantic. Not that they were the first Jews to settle the neighborhoods. At the turn of the last century, as popular entertainments like Pawnee Bill’s Great Far East Show featured costumed Cossacks, Russian-speaking Jews from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Brownsville area of Brooklyn began settling along the newly developed Atlantic waterfront of Brooklyn, setting up left-leaning political groups and establishing a Yiddish theater in the old Brighton Beach Music Hall.

For reasons that may seem self-evident, the Jews who resettled Brighton Beach during the 1980s and ’90s viewed the world differently than their pinko predecessors from the Lower East Side. Unlike their forebears who fled the czarist barefoot brigades in the Pale of Settlement, that vast and vaguely boot-shaped swath of buffer ghetto that once separated Russia from Europe and ran from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, Soviet Jews did not see socialism in any of its variants as a liberation theology. The Moses of this second wave of Russian Jews was not Karl Marx but Ronald Reagan.

“Many Russian Jews came around the time of the Reagan Administration and compare his stand favorably to the pandering and weakness of the Carter Administration,” says Igor Branovan, president of the American Forum of Russian Jewry. “This created the stamp in the mind of the Russian immigrant that Republicans are stronger and more likely to stand up to tyranny than the Democrats.”

This gratitude for Reagan’s aggressive foreign policy tends to come with a domestic policy-preference flipside, in the form of revulsion at the perceived statism of the Democrats. “Because of the Soviet experience, Russian Jews are by nature skeptical of activist government,” says Branovan, who emigrated from Kaliningrad, Russia, in 1980. “We are drawn to the philosophy of rugged individualism espoused by the GOP.”

“When I was a kid coming up on Kings Highway”—the artery that slices through the heart of southern Brooklyn—“everybody was looking for opportunities,” says Dmitriy Salita, a professional boxer whose family moved from Odessa to Brooklyn in 1991. “Russian Jews are smart and hardworking and came here hungry to make something of themselves. I’d say less than 1 percent of Russian Jews think of themselves as liberals in terms of expecting [help from] the government.”

One percent is likely low, but Russian Jews vote Republican at the national level much more than other Jews. The most recent data, from the 2004 election, show that Russian Jews preferred Bush to Kerry by a margin of 3 to 1. Israel, national security, and the economy topped the list of concerns among Russian Jews, but there was also a cultural component to their preference; they were among the so-called Values Voters who voted Republican based on cultural wedge issues. A month before the election, 81 percent of Russian Jews supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages—nearly the inverse number of Jews nationally. They also expressed heavy opposition to affirmative action and showed less support for on-demand abortion, according to numbers compiled by the Research Institute for New Americans, which tracks the Russian-speaking community.

At the local level, it’s a more mixed picture, but even in municipal elections, Russian Jews will vote against the grain. “In New York, Russian Jews have consistently supported candidates known to be tough on crime and conservative on moral issues, notably New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,” says Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis. “Whether their children will vote the same way remains to be seen.”

***

Theirs is no country-club Republicanism. Russian Jews in New York, the nation’s largest Russian-Jewish community, numbering 350,000, are largely under-employed; a majority earns less than $30,000. (These numbers do not reflect under-education. The average Russian Jewish immigrant has more higher education that his average American Jewish counterpart.)

Together with nostalgic Reaganism, Israel is a major factor cited in the development of Russian Jewish politics. The most recent study on the subject found that 89 percent of Russian Jews have close relatives or friends in Israel, more than twice the proportion of American-born Jews. “Within the Russian Jewish community, Israel is not an idea, it’s a reality,” says Branovan, of the American Forum of Russian Jewry. “When things occur in Israel, it impacts the Russian population in an immediate way. There’s a stronger connection.”

“Russians really have no sense of Jewish identity that can be built around anything besides the state of Israel,” says activist Rabbi Moish Soloway, of Brighton Beach. “A lot of the younger Russian folks especially are very hawkish, similar to the new generation of Israelis.”

“We could not be Jews in USSR, and so Russian Jews learned to express their love of Judaism through their relationship to Israel,” notes Salita, the boxer, an observant Jew active in a Lubavitcher youth program. “In Odessa, we’d listen to American radio just to get news about Israel. Whatever good happened in Israel, we rejoiced together. We all shared the dream of freedom but didn’t have it. We have an understanding of how important it is. To have a place on earth for the Jews is still something incredible to them.”

There is also the related issue of the profound cynicism and tough-mindedness born of living under a totalitarian regime. “Russian Jews understand that the dovish position on Israel is naïve, so they won’t support liberal candidates on this issue,” says Gennady Katsov, a journalist with Russian cable news channel RTN. “The Soviet experience teaches that you have to stay strong, choose non-conformism, and fight your enemies. It is more Malcolm X, less Martin Luther King.” Salita says Russian Jews “have been whipped on their backs and have a tougher mentality born from experience. They are tired of being bullied, being told what to do.”

Lurking behind these much-discussed reasons for Russian Jewish conservatism is the fact of deeply ingrained Russian xenophobia, which some say the nation’s Jews have internalized despite being an oppressed group themselves. This, say some, makes them more susceptible to the racial dog whistles employed by conservative politicians. Weeks before the 2008 election, Walter Ruby reported for the Jewish Week that he did not have to search Brighton Beach very hard before finding Russian-speaking Jews who subscribed to a Sarah Palin’s view of the United States; one real, one fake; one implicitly white, one not. “The president of such a great country ought to be a real American, by which I mean a white person,” one respondent told Ruby. Others expressed the fear that a Barack Obama victory would lead to “black triumphalism” and increased crime. When Rabbi Soloway appeared on local Russian-language Radio Davidzon to advocate for Obama, callers attacked him viciously.

“It’s gotten worse since the election,” says Soloway, a Democrat who emigrated from Leningrad in 1989 and today writes a column for the right-wing Russian-language paper Evreiskii Mir (Jewish World). “I am routinely called everything from ‘liberal scumbag’ to ‘fag lover.’ The style of many Russian Jews is old-school communist—my way or the highway. It’s like, ‘Why did you bother moving to the United States? You should have stayed in Russia.’ ”

Some say this is less true among the young. “Cities in the former USSR are not like NYC,” says Salita. “You don’t grow up around different kinds of people on the train and the bus, walking down the street. But the second generation of Russian Jews is like all American kids, absorbed into American society.”

Then there is the Russian respect for strongmen and the tough-guy image cultivated by the Republican Party. Russian Jews may unanimously loathe the Christian militarist Vladimir Putin, but they fell in love with his American analog, George W. Bush.

“Russians respect power,” says Gary Shteyngart, a novelist who emigrated to New York from Leningrad at age 7. “Many immigrants give lip service to democracy but in the end they want some patriarchal white guy to run things with a strong hand. Feelings of oppression that began within the anti-Semitic confines of the Soviet Union are turned from a defensive to an offensive stance under the false perception that the Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the Communist Party of the USSR.”

“There’s something in a lot of Russian-Jewish immigrant men that is opposed to the ideas of improvement and progress,” says Mark Krotov, a book editor whose family emigrated from Moscow to Atlanta in 1991. “The idea that it’s worth fighting for things—they think it’s feminine. They detest the Putin regime but bristle at the notion of opposition. It sometimes runs in tandem with an anti-intellectual streak, which is ironic when it’s found among intellectuals. There is this general disgust for weakness.”

This disgust took a noxious form during the controversy over a lower Manhattan Islamic center and mosque last summer, when young Russian Jewish immigrants made common cause with the quasi-fascist English Defence League in opposing the center, now called Park51. But do they really represent the future of Russian Jews in America? While there exists no hard data on the subject, it’s possible the future looks like 20-something Bela Shayevich, who started her assimilation in Chicago 20 years ago and now finds herself somewhere between nominally liberal and completely nonpolitical, just like most Americans her age. She does not consider her apathy a dereliction of civic duty but a psychological American luxury.

“The degree and the nature of my father’s and my grandparents’ convictions come out of trauma,” she says. “It makes me very sad to see how they compensate for having spent the majority of their lives in a terrible place.”

Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

Was it hard to return to Orthodox Judaism after all those years in which you called yourself a “freethinker”?

Well, don’t forget I was educated Jewishly, thank God, and I’ve never had trouble admitting I was wrong. Thank God for that, too, and that may be because I made so many mistakes. Thank God for all of them.

Was it a mistake going underground against the czar?

No, I don’t think so, though it was a mistake going against Judaism—or at least abandoning it for freethinking. It would have been better to have fought the czar and defended Judaism.

Who made you realize that?

Levinsky. David Levinsky. He was a fictional character, of course, my own creation. But it’s no coincidence that at the start of the novel and the end of it, Levinsky notes that all his worldly success meant nothing to him and he was still, in his innermost being, the same Yeshiva boy who had swayed over his prayers. I wrote that at the peak of my career, and it was the most important thing I ever wrote, and it just came out of me. And I began rethinking my whole life at that time.

When was that?

Well, I started writing The Rise of David Levinsky in 1912 for McClure’s. I’m not sure the magazine understood what it was getting in to. I finished it in 1917, and we brought it out just before the Bolshevik Revolution. I was 57 at the time. There were a lot of friends, including that young fellow Mencken, who wanted me to give up newspaper work and spend the last third of my life writing fiction. I rather liked Mencken, by the way, despite his attacks on the Jews; we used to lunch once in a while at the Algonquin, and I helped him with his Yiddish monograph. He later wrote of his disappointment that I couldn’t give up the “razzle dazzle” of the newspaper life.

Was that it, the razzle dazzle?

Well, there were serious matters. And not just World War I, which was one of our mistakes, and a serious one—the pacifism was a serious mistake, but not as bad a mistake as the cynicism about America and America’s motives. The fact is that even as we all came to America we underestimated her.

Someone once made a remark about the little speech in David Levinsky about how, for all the exploitation of Jewish garment workers by the bosses, the Americans were the best-dressed people in the world. The remark was that it signaled your understanding that maybe the labor unions themselves were too cynical.

While I was writing that chapter, the garment workers were outside the Forward building throwing stones at my office. That’s because I’d urged a settlement in the strike. It was a bitter time. I began to rethink a lot of things then.

Like Zionism.

That, too.

What was your error?

Arrogance. A lack of vision. I came to understand only later that no socialist, not one of them, could compete with Herzl in that department. He was just way ahead of us. And the people were with him.

Meyer London taught you that?

He was the first socialist ever elected to Congress, and he lost his seat over it because the voters, the workers, right here in the Lower East Side, the workers who had just elected a Socialist, they understood what it would mean to have a Jewish state. He was asked about the Balfour Declaration. He said: “Let us stop pretending about the Jewish past and let us stop making fools of ourselves about the Jewish future.” He promptly lost his seat. Looking back, we can see it was a kind of socialist arrogance. His own workers were ahead of him.

Can that be said of about your movement vis-à-vis the communists?

No, I think we adjusted to the facts sooner than most anyone. I declared my position in 1923 when I got back from the Soviet Union and said: “Russia has at present less freedom than it had in the earliest days of Romanov rule. … The world has never yet seen such a despotism.” It would have been impossible, illogical for me to go back to a literary career at that point. It was essential that we defeat the communists here, and that was what I gave it all up for. In the fight against the Soviet, we were not followers but we were in the lead. I gave up a lot for that fight. I think Mencken understood that better than most, believe it or not. I am like the son who gave up a literary life for business—only on my business everything depended, and I have sorrows, but no regrets.

You failed to lead on Zionism.

I met my match in Jabotinsky. It was an important error in my life, my denunciation of him after his speech at the Manhattan Opera House. That was 1940. He called then for the urgent evacuation of the Jews from Europe to Eretz Israel, and I turned around and belittled him in the pages of the Forward. I gave a whole page to it, and that’s when I wrote, “Six million is a pretty small state.” I was derisive, and I was wrong.

When did you realize that?

Immediately, and when Jabotinsky died a few weeks later—he lay down from fatigue at a right-wing camp in upstate New York where he was training young Jews to defend themselves, and his heart gave out as he was lying down—it was a terrible blow for all Jews. I was furious at the staff of the Forward, which refused to cover his funeral. So, I wrote the editorial that has been quoted ever since, saying that his death was, coming as it did at such a grim time for the Jewish people, “in the true sense of the word, a national catastrophe.” I predicted that he would be missed not only then, in the middle of the storm, but later, “when the storm is over and the time comes to heal the wounds and rebuild Jewish life on new foundations in a new time.”

New foundations—or old ones.

Hah! Alt-neu-foundations. How’s that?

Is that when you began to re-think religion?

Well, I’d been re-thinking it for a long time, as the beginning and end of The Rise of David Levinsky makes clear. It never left me. It was gnawing at me the whole time. But freethinking is a kind of addiction of its own. What started the dam to break was Sholem Asch. He came in and plopped his novel about Jesus on my desk, and it just came out. He was suggesting that Jews treat Jesus the way Christians view Jesus, and I threw him out. I told him to burn the novel. And when he resisted, I banned him from the Forward. And I wrote a whole book attacking him, and in that book I insisted that I wasn’t religious. And then the illogic of my position began to eat at me, and that is how it happened, and I worked my way back to the Torah and to Talmud and I made peace with the boy in the yeshiva, and I consider it my greatest achievement.

Did it destroy all that came before in your life?

[After a pause.] I would have to say it validates it. Remember that as Levinsky stood at the rail of the ship as it prepared to deposit him on American soil, he said a prayer, and it was that God would not hide his face from him in the new land. It was a promise as much as a prayer, and I tend to see my return to religion as a redemption of that promise.

This is an imaginary interview. So, what are we to make of it?

Read the record. It will show you where I was going. My great deputy at the Forward, David Shub, wrote long after I had passed away that what I lived for above all else was Russian literature, and it is true. It was my greatest love. But literature itself is something that can’t be proved and is a matter of faith and speculation. It doesn’t make it wrong.

Seth Lipsky is the founding editor of the English-language Forward. He is writing a biography of Abraham Cahan for Nextbook Press.

I’ve been thinking about that historical moment again in the wake of the death earlier this month of Marek Edelman. It was Edelman who, after the death of Mordechai Anielewicz, acceded as leader of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. He led the fight that some have said saved Jewish honor, though he would repudiate the sentiment. He understood that nearly all Jews dealt with certain death in myriad honorable ways that none can second-guess. Edelman survived and lived out his life in Poland, where he made his career as a physician. He hewed throughout his life to the Bund.

It happens that the first time I thought much about the Bund, I was living in Europe on assignment to cover the climactic years of the Cold War for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I was having dinner with my wife at our home in Brussels, when the phone rang and an operator came on the line and asked me to hold for the deputy foreign minister of Israel. I didn’t know Benjamin Netanyahu well, but I’d been defending his policies. He was calling to ask whether he could mention my name to the new proprietors of the Jerusalem Post as a possible editor of the paper. I was touched, but had to tell him that I was planning to return to America to become editor of the Forward.

There was an awkward silence, and he finally said—in amazement—“the Bundist newspaper?”

I told him that it was a bit more complicated, that there’d been no more anti-communist paper in all of American history. Netanyahu was exceptionally gracious, under the circumstances, and we rang off. In fact, the Forward was never a Bundist paper, and, I learned in due course, the relationship between its editor, Abraham Cahan, and the Bund was decidedly rocky. But history has a way of playing tricks on all of us, and in my years at the Forward, I personally caused to be hung in its editorial rooms a portrait of the Bundist martyr Henryk Erhlich, who, with the outbreak of the war, had moved, with Victor Alter, east into the Soviet zone only to be murdered by Stalin.

Edelman was nearly 40 years younger than Erlich. He joined the Bund youth movement in the late 1930s, and ended up confined in the ghetto in Warsaw, where he helped organize the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or Jewish Combat Organization, which stunned the Nazis when the attack on the ghetto began. When Anielewicz was trapped, and committed suicide, Edelman became commander. After he and his comrades put up the fight that astonished the world, Edelman managed to escape through the sewers and, in 1944, to participate in the uprising against the Nazis by the Free Polish forces.

That was the battle that saw the betrayal of the Free Poles by the Red Army, which sat on its guns on the East side of the Vistula and exposed the communist camarilla in its full cynicism. After the war, Edelman stayed in Poland and in the Bund, though he opposed the Bund’s absorption into the Polish communist party. He emerged in harness with the Free Labor Movement when it began to organize in Poland, creating, in Solidarity, the institution that would crack Soviet rule and begin the end of the communist tyranny in the East bloc.

In the 1970s, the writer Hanna Krall had a long conversation with Edelman that was brought out as a book called Shielding the Flame. It included, at the end, a letter Krall wrote to the translators. In the season of the 40th anniversary of the uprising Edelman led, she had been with him in his home, where he was held under house arrest by General Jaruzelski’s communist regime. It had wanted him to participate in the official commemoration, but he’d refused. Solidarity promptly mounted its own commemoration and wanted—even needed—him in its ranks. So, Krall wrote, the Jewish path and the Polish path had merged again.

Not that Edelman was immune from mistakes. He’d issued earlier this decade a statement likening the Palestinian Arab “resistance” to the fight that he and his comrades had waged more than half a century ago, a statement that galled the Israelis. All the greater the irony of the bond that was established between Edelman and Moshe Arens, who, after Edelman’s death, wrote one of the loveliest tributes to him in Haaretz. Arens, a follower of Jabotinsky, had once gone to meet with Edelman and, apparently, formed an admiration for him, and he wrote that it was not only Edelman who was buried that day.

“The Bund, which commanded his loyalty to his dying days, was also laid to rest,” he wrote. He noted that Edelman’s coffin had been draped with the red banner of the Bund, with the words “Bund—Yidisher Sozialistisher Farband.” He called it “a farewell to a great movement, which had a massive following among Polish Jewry before the war, and had led all other Jewish parties in the last Polish municipal elections held before the war.” He noted that the Bund believed that “a Socialist Poland would be built” and “there the Jews of Poland, maintaining the Yiddish culture and the Yiddish language, would find their rightful place.”

Arens acknowledged that Zionism and emigration to Palestine were “anathema” to the Bund and that the Bund “reserved a special hatred” for Jabotinsky, who had called on the Jews to flee Poland. “The Bund’s lofty ideals took precedence over reality,” Arens wrote. “And cruel reality put an end to the Bund.” In the end, he wrote, “Zionism prevailed over the Bund.” But that, he added, “was not because most Polish Jews deemed its ideology superior, but because the human base of the Bund was exterminated, along with the rest of Polish Jewry, by the Germans during World War II.” Then Arens wrote: “Those very few who survived, like Edelman, remained fiercely loyal to the Bund, an organization that had ceased to exist, a loyalty that sustained them during the war years, and gave them the courage to heroically fight the Germans along with other Jewish fighters, outnumbered and outgunned, in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.”

* * *

What a concluding chapter that would make to the novel 1897—an aging Revisionist defense minister of Israel, weeping, if figuratively and from a distance, over the Bundist-bier of Marek Edelman. Let us ask what would prompt a hero like Arens to make this kind of bow to a hero at the other end of the ideological spectrum. We have come through a period marked by a vanishing Bund and an American Jewry in a crisis of intermarriage and assimilation. So it is a haunting question. No doubt Arens knows that we are in a time as dangerous for the Zionist enterprise—and so for all Jews—as any in history. We are in a period in which, if we are not careful, the dream of Herzl and the millions whose lives Zionism saved and inspired could be dealt a fate as cruel as that which was dealt to the socialists and to the Bund. It’s a moment when the example of a man like Marek Edelman towers over the generations.

With too few Jews around to merit a synagogue, the Concord Area Jewish Group, which we joined when my mother took a job in town, found a temporary home in the historic First Parish Church, set back from the oak-lined road that led off Route 2 from Cambridge.

The odd locale of my bat mitzvah would be merely idiosyncratic if it weren’t indicative of a much bigger karmic joke. My Jewish lineage—which on my Sephardic side can be traced back to Hebron, where my ancestors touched down in 1492 after leaving Spain, and on my Ashkenazi side includes the celebrated Yiddish writer who coined the term yenta—is rivaled only by my father’s Episcopalian Anglo-Saxon pedigree. “Don’t you ever forget it, young man, that’s blue blood that flows in those veins, the finest, purest blood that God ever gave to man,” my great-great-grandfather, John Robertson Dunlap, once told my paternal grandfather, Lewis Spence.

Had Dunlap lived to see his great-great-granddaughter recite her haftorah (even in a church), he surely would have blanched. He was not just an anti-Semite but a racial purist so consumed with the superiority of his Scotch-Irish bloodline that he wrote a thousand-page book on Dunlap genealogy, which wound back through antebellum Kentucky and still further back to the early Highland Scots.

He even made a point of avoiding Jews in public places. Family legend has it that Dunlap—a self-styled publishing tycoon who founded the first trade magazines, among them the scintillatingly titled India Rubber World—struck a deal with the head waiter at his favorite Manhattan restaurant that no one with “Jewish features” would be seated near his regular table by the window. But one afternoon, the joke was on the old man: When he sat down for lunch wearing a skullcap (his doctor had insisted that he cover his bald scalp), a waiter mistook him for an observant Jew and asked him to move. Later that same day, Dunlap snipped off his wife’s hair and promptly placed an order for a toupee.

In keeping with the requisite lifestyle of a baron of the Gilded Age, Dunlap—known for touting his credentials as a “Kentucky colonel” despite his lack of military service—spent his summers in the Adirondacks and his winters on Florida’s Gulf Coast—though it was in his beloved Manhattan where he died in the spring of 1935. One year later, another of my great-great-grandfathers, Jacob Adler, who wrote in Yiddish under the penname B. Kovner, published Laugh Jew Laugh, a collection of short stories about immigrant life in the Lower East Side that he had published over the preceding three decades in the Jewish Daily Forward. At that time, the Forward‘s readership hovered around 250,000 and Adler’s humor column was a favorite among the hordes of Yiddish-speaking newcomers who looked to the legendary paper for guidance on adjusting to life in this Promised Land. In Adler’s outlandish characters, they could see aspects of their irksome upstairs neighbor or—God forbid!—their own husbands and wives. So popular was one of Adler’s protagonists, Yente Telebende, who harangued her unfaithful husband and made everyone’s business her own, that a woman known to gossip has ever since been referred to as a yenta.

The only commonality between Jacob Adler and John Dunlap, I’d always assumed, was their progeny. I was wrong. Last fall, while scanning a copy of Laugh Jew Laugh in my Park Slope studio, I was struck by a small but significant detail: Adler’s introduction is signed off from St. Petersburg, Florida, the very same resort town where Dunlap spent his final months. As I discovered, St. Petersburg was not only the winter home of my Anglo-Saxon antecedent but also the year-round residence of my Yiddish forebear. I don’t imagine that they sipped martinis at the same social club or traded tales on the putting green, but they certainly could have strolled past one another on a white sand beach, two proud men wholly unaware of how human destiny would one day render their legacies intertwined.

Born in 1873 in Galicia, in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, Adler was not unlike the multitudes of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe and lived out the American dream. Upon arriving in New York in 1895, he began working arduous hours for a tailor in a sweatshop, all the while nursing his dream of becoming a writer. Only two years later, in 1897, he published his first poems in the nascent Forward. He soon joined the ranks of Di Yunge, or “The Young Ones”—the circle of Lower East Side literati who rejected the hard-edged political slant of their predecessors and introduced florid romanticism to Yiddish poetry—before making his mark as a humorist. By 1907, he had already published his first book, Zikhroynes, a memoir of shtetl life composed in verse, which was hailed by critics in New York and Europe. Zalmen Reisen, editor of one of Eastern Europe’s largest Yiddish newspapers, The Vilna Day, described it as “full of quiet, sad longing and heartfelt love for his childhood and the idyllic life of the Jewish shtetl.”

Adler wrote prodigiously, and somewhat obsessively, until the age of 99; he died in 1975, the year before I was born, at the age of 102. In just under a century, he churned out some 18,000 poems, more than 30,000 columns, and published work under almost 20 different pen names. He even went on publishing after his death, having written hundreds of Forward columns in advance.

Needless to say, he set the bar high for writers in the family. While I don’t foresee ever approaching his prolific—or, perhaps more accurately, lunatic—output, I do have one important thing in common with Adler: I too am a writer at the Forward (albeit the English paper, not the Yiddish, which is still printed weekly in New York). Add to the mix my Israeli family history dating back more than ten generations, and being Jewish feels like an ineluctable fate. I did, however, have a choice. In an alternate universe, I could have taken my cues from Dunlap and turned out a Protestant preppy. So what made me a Jew? Considering that I practice neither religion, it’s got nothing to do with theology.

It may be as simple as this: WASP culture, as embodied by my perennially depressed grandparents, felt painfully austere and witheringly cold. Grandma and Grandpa Spence, living in an isolated farmhouse in Cranbury, New Jersey, were the proverbial descendants of characters in a Henry James novel; two cash-poor aristocrats forced to live out the tragic indignities of a ruling class in decline. My grandfather, Lewis, who grew up in Long Island with a coterie of servants and was shipped off to boarding school in the first grade, drank bourbon every night at 6 o’clock, cursed the creeping onslaught of low culture, and wrote books that were never published. His wife, an intellectually adroit woman who languished as a housewife and elementary school librarian, joined him in his misery.

Jewish life, as embodied in my great-grandmother—Adler’s daughter Bertha Klausner, a crackerjack literary agent and the family matriarch—stood in sharp contrast. A fiercely independent and forward-thinking woman, Bertha entertained the leading writers, producers and performers of her day from her capacious apartment on 38th Street and Park Avenue. She served up lunches of whitefish and brisket and inked book deals for her bevy of celebrated clients, among them Marcel Marceau and, once upon a time, Upton Sinclair.

As a child, I instinctively gravitated toward this beatific woman with her huge bosoms and crown of silver hair. She fed me Entenmann’s chocolate cake, smothered me in mama-bear hugs and was known for her constant refrain at family gatherings: “All my great-grandchildren are geniuses.” Lewis, on the other hand, made no secret of the fact that he didn’t much care for children. I can hazily remember fishing for rainbow perch with him off the dock on Upper Saranac Lake—on the very patch of Adirondack land inherited from Dunlap—but I can more vividly recall how, when I was a distressed seven-year-old, standing on his weathered gray deck in a puddle of tears, he exploded in anger and refused me entry into the house.

“My home is no place for children to cry,” he bellowed down at me.

I was scared; the memory stuck. More importantly, I don’t think I stopped crying. Several years later, when he took me for Sunday services at Saranac’s rustic lakeside church, where patrician men in pastel blazers worshipped beside their trim, smiling wives, I winced with every ministerial reference to Christ, wanting to scream “But I’m Jewish!”

When my mother and father met in Boston in the early 1970s, the bigotry and cultural divisions that would have kept their ancestors from crossing paths in St. Petersburg only a few decades earlier had dissolved into the collective memory of America’s ugly past. In Cambridge, the ethnically mixed corner of the Northeast my parents inhabited, activists and academics freely commingled in the progressive political circles at the crest of the anti-war years. Vietnam protests in Harvard Square were just petering out and echoes of Joan Baez playing at Club 47 could still be heard in the vibrant folk scene that continued at its successor, Club Passim.

My parents—two tenacious and idealistic bureaucrats—first met while working for Massachusetts governor Frank Sargent (one of many liberal Republicans to lead the bluest state in the Union). My father agreed to raise his children Jewish, though we celebrated Christmas and Easter, and nobody flinched. The mountains of conflict that eventually overtook my parents’ marriage had little to do with religion or ethnicity, although family life might have been far more peaceful if that was all that divided them.

This isn’t to say that their interfaith union produced no fallout. We have been subject to the rips and fissures that intermarriage inevitably seems to create. My mother’s father, a sociology of religion professor who has become increasingly observant in the years since my parents were wed in the Berkshires in 1973, has done his part to carry on the tradition of shunning the young who choose partners outside of the fold. To date, he has boycotted three family weddings, all of them his own children’s and grandchildren’s. Still, he relents and resumes relations if the kids are raised Jewish.

Standing in an Episcopal church on the Upper West Side last June, watching my brother’s two sons being baptized, I couldn’t help but wonder how things might have been different if my grandfather had taken a less punitive approach. It certainly wasn’t his committed observance or disdain for mixed marriages that molded my identity. And while I take issue with his tactics—in part because of the hurt they inflict, and in part because they only serve to further distance people from Jewish life—I do understand the sentiment. It was not easy to attend that baptism. I flinched at every reference to “our lord Jesus” just like I did at age nine, sitting in the pine pews at Upper Saranac’s Church of the Ascension. Only this time it was my own sibling’s ritual, not that of some ruddy-faced stranger in Nantucket red pants, that foisted the sense of otherness upon me.

Yet in spite of our obvious cultural differences—my brother and I seem to have split our parents’ ancestral traditions straight down the middle—we nevertheless share what our parents had in common: a commitment to social responsibility and an engagement with the politics and culture of our time. During the fifteen years that my parents were married, their respective relatives grew to love coming together at family gatherings, where they could discuss what most bourgeois intellectuals from the Northeast tend to discuss: wine, presidential races, and their undying aspirations for the Democratic party. Lewis, in particular, enjoyed parsing politics and theology with my mother’s father, an exceedingly scholarly Jew, and talking theatre and books with Bertha. In some sense, they all may have had more in common than not.

Lewis’s fortunes also turned: He finally published a book, though he didn’t live to hear about it. Two weeks after his death (I was twenty-one and just about to graduate from Barnard) we got the news that a small upstate publisher specializing in Adirondack literature had accepted his manuscript. It was a memoir of the four childhood summers he spent on Upper Saranac Lake with his grandfather, John Robertson Dunlap. In reading A Mountain View, I saw where the stern, imperious grandfather that I knew in my childhood had come from: By Lewis’s own account, Dunlap, with his eye patch and cane, was the scariest grandfather of them all.

I also grasped the depth of my great-great-grandfather’s anti-Semitism—and just how far my own grandfather had strayed from that past. The fact that not one, but two of his children married Jews gives some indication. On a recent visit to my aunt’s home in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, where she lives with her Jewish husband of twenty-five years, I noticed another, slightly more subtle indication: Hanging on the wall was a lithograph inscribed “For the Spences,” signed by an artist friend of my grandparents who had lived not far away from them in Roosevelt, New Jersey. The artist? The Jewish Social Realist painter and photographer, Ben Shahn. Perhaps the occasion of my bat mitzvah wasn’t the first time that Dunlap had rolled over in his grave.

View photos from A Living Lens

The first issue of The Jewish Daily Forward, or the Forverts, as it was long known to most of its readers, hit newsstands on April 22, 1897, 110 years ago this Sunday. As Pete Hamill notes in his introduction to A Living Lens, a book of photographs culled from the newspaper’s extensive archives and destined for coffee tables across Long Island, the paper was not the first aimed at a Yiddish-speaking audience, but within 30 years, it had become the most successful, selling about 250,000 copies a day.

A Living Lens, edited by the Forward‘s current arts and culture editor (and sometime Nextbook contributor) Alana Newhouse and tied to an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, contains over 500 pictures—a neat peek into the history of both the paper and the worlds it covered. And yet, even with an array of lucid essays—by Ruth Wisse, J. Hoberman, Ilan Stavans, and Jenna Weissman Joselit, among many others—the book hints at more stories than it tells. Some of the most intriguing images give us no more than a brief glance at what was, in many ways, the Forward‘s chief competition for the hearts and minds of its newly arrived audience—the Yiddish theater, a bustling entertainment and business whose influence and stars would trickle into Broadway, Hollywood, and beyond.

Though the first Yiddish theater companies weren’t founded until the late 1800s, their roots lay as far back as the Middle Ages. As told by Joel Berkowitz, a Jewish studies professor at the University of Albany and author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, “There had been an amateur—which doesn’t’ mean necessarily bad—performance tradition for hundreds of years, in terms of the Purimspiel, much of it improvised, some scripted.” Still, until the 1800s, Jewish theater remained a strictly seasonal event, constrained by two traditional laws: a woman could not perform in public, and men (as well as women) were forbidden to cross-dress. “If you’re going to have a year-round theater, then all the performers and characters have to be male, which takes a lot of interest out of it,” says Berkowitz.

It wasn’t until after the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, that adherence to those laws began to loosen. Widely acknowledged as the father of Yiddish theater, Russian-born poet and playwright Abraham Goldfaden was living in Romania in 1876 when he became one of the first to gather a permanent, professional troupe of actors and actresses. Before him, “There were sporadic efforts to professionalize, but Goldfaden makes it stick,” Berkowitz notes. Soon after, Yiddish theater became an international event; when 3 million Jews fled the pogroms and restrictions of Russia for London and the United States, they brought Yiddish theater along.

The Forward was by no means a simple booster for Yiddish theater, but rather one of its toughest critics, as Stefan Kanfer notes in his lively history of the Yiddish stage, Stardust Lost. At the paper’s helm for most of its first 50 years was Abraham Cahan, best known today for his classic novel of immigration and assimilation, The Rise of David Levinsky—written, it should be noted, in English. Cahan’s own opinions of theater were not unlike those held by the novel’s beautiful Anna Temkin, the daughter of a Hebrew poet, who looks to plays for “moral force and beauty,” and dismisses those without it as “mere froth.” Many of the shows found downtown were, indeed, unabashed trash, or shund, to use the Yiddish term—soapy melodramas, musicals, and vaudeville—though more and more playwrights and performers would eventually answer Cahan’s call for more serious fare.

Not that Cahan’s tastes are evidenced—or even mentioned—in A Living Lens. Some faces will be familiar to anyone who’s ever waxed nostalgic for the heyday of the Lower East Side—Boris Thomashefsky, Paul Muni, and Molly Picon—but for all those stars there are many more whose names have been forgotten, if they ever were well-known to begin with.