The Myth of the Ellis Island Name Change

According to numerous jokes, family legends, and even the movie The Godfather, Part II, officials at Ellis Island frequently Anglicized immigrants’ exotic or difficult-to-pronounce names, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. These stories loom particularly large in American Jewish cultural memory. But Kirsten Fermaglich cites ample evidence that this was not the case; rather, newcomers to U.S. usually took the initiative, changing their names voluntarily after their arrival:

[At Ellis Island], immigration procedures did not typically include the question “What is your name?” Bureaucrats simply checked immigrants’ names to make sure they matched the names already listed on ships’ passenger lists. . . . Between 1892 and 1920, when thousands of immigrants passed through the immigration station on Ellis Island each day, there were no descriptions of Ellis Island name-changing in popular magazines or books. And even after immigration slowed significantly in the 1920s, popular books and magazines for the next four decades did not typically describe Ellis Island officials as changing immigrant names. . . .

It was not until the 1970s that the image of Ellis Island name-changing took hold of the American imagination. One popular 1979 book about Ellis Island and the immigrant experience, for example, described officials who were “casual and uncaring on the matter of names.” . . .

Portraits of involuntary name-changing at Ellis Island fit both with the island’s new prominence [beginning in the late 1960s] as a symbol of immigration, and with growing distrust of government authority. . . . Ellis Island name-changing also fits another emerging theme in American culture in the 1970s: [the] quest for authenticity. . . . From the 1970s through the 1990s, novels, films and plays that portrayed Jewish life, such as Wendy Wasserstein’s play Isn’t It Romantic? and Barry Levinson’s movie, Avalon, represented name changers as phonies or sellouts.

Read more at The Conversation

More about: American Jewish History, History & Ideas, Immigration, Names

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society