When Ulysses S. Grant ran for president in 1868, his infamous Order 11 expelling all Jews from the military territory of Tennessee during the Civil War was still fresh in Jewish memory.
The Jewish press in America came into its own, vigorously raising that memory, and not just for the Jews. New York daily newspapers quoted the American Israelite of Cincinnati on the subject. Chicago daily newspapers quoted the Jewish Messenger of New York.
Grant was very apologetic and became a big supporter of American Jewish efforts to aid beleaguered Jews abroad. When the Romanian government enacted anti-Semitic measures and encouraged pogroms, Grant sent a San Francisco Jew, Benjamin Peixotto, to Romania as American consul, with specific instructions to protest anti-Jewish actions by the Romanian government. Those actions shocked Romania’s government and actually helped for a number of years. The episode established the power of the Jewish press, at least its ability to mobilize Jews.
Many Jewish leaders in the middle of the 19th century proclaimed there was no such thing as a Jewish vote. Isaac Leeser, who published the first English-language Jewish newspaper, Occident, in 1843, wrote in 1855: “With politics, Jews have little concern except to vote for those whom they may individually deem most fitting.”
But politicians knew better, especially after the Grant episode. Boss Tweed actually helped subsidize the newspapers Hebrew Leader and Die Yiddishe Zeitung in New York to promote Tammany’s influence among Jewish voters.
During the last half century, Jews have not been unaware of the power of the Jewish press. Whenever it has been necessary to gather large groups of Jews together for a demonstration in San Francisco — notably on behalf of Israel or Soviet Jews — the first question on the minds of the organizers has been: “When is the deadline for the Bulletin?”
But especially in America, the Jewish press has had a community-making role beyond mobilization. Maimonides wrote that “by virtue of his nature, man seeks to form communities,” and that has been particularly true of Jews. In America, with its exceptional mobility and dispersion, that “community” has been harder to come by than in ghettoized Europe.
The Israelite reported in 1859 that some “fifteen Jewish Israelites,” on Pike’s Peak in the newly opened Jefferson Territory, had just organized themselves into a congregation called Beth Elohim Bamidbar, “the House of the Lord in the Wilderness.”
That example of community-seeking on the frontier remained largely true in America, where Jews, who were not forcibly ghettoized, tended to be splintered even in many cities with large Jewish populations. Synagogues held congregations together but were often unconnected to one another. Organizations sprang up to serve the purpose, but they were also often unconnected.
The root of the term “community” is the word “common,” and it is the Jewish press that has provided the common body of knowledge that makes a community.
In the last century, in particular, it became increasingly necessary for the Jewish community to receive common news about issues that the general press carried only superficially.
Among those issues: immigration, Jewish problems abroad, growing domestic Jewish problems, Nazism, the suppression of Soviet Jews and the state of Israel. More recently, the Jewish press has focused on the problems of Jewish continuity.
For this past century, the Bulletin and its predecessors, like the Jewish press in other cities, has carried this common news and become an indispensable factor in making community.
For a long while, many Jews — especially those who didn’t want to appear too “parochial” — tended to undervalue the Jewish press. Nevertheless, they covertly read the Jewish press in at least the Sunday-New York Times mode: headlines, an occasional article of special interest, the columns, of course.
That reticence has diminished, partly because of a renaissance of Jewish interest and partly because the Jewish press has itself evolved. In response to the new Jewish mood, it has become more in-depth and exciting.
Always, however, the Jewish press has provided the common news that is the life-blood of a community. It will become even more important to Jewish life as we enter the new century.