Yisroel Belsky

New York in this era

From the 1850s onward, New York became the primary gateway for Jewish migration to America, transforming from a city of a few thousand Jews into a metropolis housing hundreds of thousands by the mid-twentieth century. German Jewish merchants who arrived first established themselves in lower Manhattan, building synagogues and charitable institutions; the massive wave of Eastern European immigrants beginning in the 1880s created a teeming, Yiddish-speaking world on the Lower East Side, where tenement dwellers packed synagogues, study halls, and street-corner debates about labor rights and socialism alongside traditional Torah. After the Holocaust, New York emerged as the unchallenged center of American Jewish life and scholarship—a place where R. Moshe Feinstein, arriving in 1936, became the most influential halakhic authority of the postwar diaspora, issuing rulings from his small Matzos Lower East Side yeshiva that were followed worldwide, while R. Abraham Joshua Heschel, at the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrestled theology and social justice into dialogue. The religious ferment was as much American as Jewish: Mordecai Kaplan's Reconstructionist movement challenged tradition from within, while the spiritual hunger of postwar America created an audience for thinkers who made Jewish wisdom speak to modern alienation and conscience.

About New York

New York City, in the US state of New York, stands on the homeland of the Lenape people. Dutch settlers founded New Amsterdam in the 1620s; the English took it in 1664 and renamed it, and it served as the national capital from 1785 to 1790 before its five boroughs were consolidated in 1898. Its Jewish history began in 1654, when 23 refugees from Recife in Brazil arrived. Between 1880 and 1924 mass migration from Eastern Europe made the Lower East Side a crowded Yiddish-speaking district, and the city became a centre of yeshivas and rabbinical seminaries, among them Yeshiva University, founded in 1886. About 960,000 Jews live in the five boroughs today. Its universities include Columbia, founded in 1754.

In New York at the same time

Dov Berish Elefant, Solomon Klonitzky-Kline, Louis Ginzberg, Moshe Soloveichik, Chaim Heller, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn

Across the traditions, in New York at the same time

• Murray Gell-Mannscience