After They Closed the Gates After They Closed the Gates Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 Libby Garland The University of Chicago Press chicago & london libby garland is assistant professor of history at Kingsborough Community College, the City University of New York. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-12245-8 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-12259-5 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226122595.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garland, Libby, author. After they closed the gates : Jewish illegal immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 / Libby Garland. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-12245-8 (cloth : alkaline paper)—isbn 978-0-226-12259-5 (e-book) 1. Jews, European—United States—History—20th century. 2. Immigrants—United States— History—20th century. 3. Illegal aliens—United States—History—20th century. 4. United States—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. 5. Emigration and immigration law—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. e184.354.g37 2014 304.80973—dc23 2013029157 a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). c o n t e n t s Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 • Building the Apparatus of Immigration Control 14 2 • American Law, Jewish Solidarity 43 3 • Smuggling in Jews 89 4 • Illicit Journeys 118 5 • Battling Alien Registration 148 6 • Abolishing the Quotas 177 Epilogue 213 Notes 217 Index 277 a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s In the course of writing about people who resorted to counterfeit documents and adopted personae in order to slip past national borders, I found myself thinking a lot about how the modern world has produced some very strange ideas regarding individual identities, as well as about the ways that people rep- resent themselves in order to conform to such notions. The persona of the “au- thor” may be one of the strangest of such invented individual identities. There is something odd about putting one’s name by itself on the front of a book, as if research, writing, and publishing were not a collective enterprise—intellectu- ally, logistically, financially, and emotionally. It turns out, for example, that being able to pay the rent is generally a prereq- uisite for producing a book. I am grateful to the following for providing finan- cial support for my research and writing: the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the University of Michigan Rackham School of Graduate Studies and the Program in American Culture, and the Profes- sional Staff Congress–City University of New York Research Awards program. Thanks go, too, to the faculty and administrators at Kingsborough Commu- nity College for their support of my work, particularly to my department chair, Fran Kraljic, and to the department administrator, Cindy Adelstein. No historical researcher can get very far without the help of archivists and librarians. My thanks go to all those at the American Jewish Archives; the American Jewish Committee Archives; the American Jewish Historical Society; the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives; the Immigration and Naturalization Historical Reference Library; the Leo Baeck viii  Acknowledgments Institute; the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; the National Archives in New York City, Chicago, and Washington DC; the Western Jewish History Center; and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, who helped lead me to wonderful material. The librarians at the New York Public Library’s Jewish Division, especially Faith Jones, Roberta Saltzman, and Michael Terry, were always particularly helpful in finding elusive publications and providing answers to obscure questions about Jewish history. The heart of this study consists of stories and documents that do not be- long to me. I thank those people who shared their family stories with me for this project: Joan Friedman, Sidney Rabinovich, Ester Reiter, Ethel Seid, and Martin Stein. I am grateful, as well, to the many people whose often painful encounters with US immigration law produced the sources that now reside in archives and libraries, which I have drawn from throughout this book. I thank, too, all those students and friends whose stories about their present-day expe- riences of migration—though I do not quote them in these pages—profoundly shaped my understanding of the personal stakes, risks, and hopes entailed in such encounters with the immigration system. Studying and thinking are activities that happen as much communally as they do solitarily, and so I am lucky to have found myself surrounded by smart, creative, and hardworking people throughout my years working on this project. During the time I spent at the University of Michigan, I was part of an especially vibrant intellectual community; I thank the staff, faculty, under- graduates, and graduate students in American Culture and History for their energy and communal ethos. Particular thanks go to Gina Morantz-Sanchez, Anita Norich, David Scobey, and Terry McDonald for their thoughtful criti- cism and scholarly insight. In New York, I have been equally surrounded by intellectual vitality. Col- leagues at Basic Books, Big Onion Walking Tours, CLAL–The National Jew- ish Center for Learning and Leadership, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, besides being important mentors and friends, provided me with perspectives on the practices of research, writing, and history from outside the world of academia that made me think in new ways about all these things. In particular, I would like to thank Justine Ahlstrom, Tim Bartlett, Jim Basker, Stephen Bottum, Shari Cohen, Michael Gottsegen, Glenda Johnson, Jo Ann Miller, and Robert Rabinowitz. Teaching, too, has meant learning to engage in new ways with my subject. My students at the School for Democracy and Leadership, the College of Staten Island, Hunter College, and Kings- borough Community College always brought into our classes passionate opinions, provocative questions, and a breadth of personal experience that Acknowledgments  ix pushed me as a teacher, a researcher, and a writer. My colleagues at these in- stitutions also have taught me a great deal about what it means to write for and talk with others about history. In this regard, I would like particularly to thank Rick Armstrong, Jhumki Basu, Nancy Gannon, Dan Gelbtuch, Kevin Kolk- meyer, Eddie Pessutti, Rick Repetti, Sarah Schwartz, Jacob Segal, Michael Spear, Eben Wood, and Joanna Yip. I also thank the many patient, smart people who have read this project in all its various stages and provided thoughtful, detailed feedback. This book would not be a book at all, of course, without the editors and other staff of the Univer- sity of Chicago Press. Robert Devens took the project on and worked with me to reshape it; and Russell Damian and Tim Mennel were enormously helpful in getting me over the finish line. Elissa Park provided tactful, smart copyedit- ing; Mary Gehl oversaw the book’s production. All were encouraging, steering me and the manuscript with grace, intelligence, and patience through the long process of publication. Thanks go as well to the two anonymous readers for the press whose input aided me along the way. I appreciate, too, the chance to have published some of my ideas as articles. Portions of chapters 3 and 4 appeared in somewhat different form in Libby Garland, “Not-quite-closed Gates: Jewish Alien Smuggling in the Post-Quota Years,” American Jewish History 94, no. 3 (September 2008): 197–224. Chapter 5 appeared in somewhat different form in Libby Garland, “Fighting to Be Insiders: American Jewish Leaders and the Michigan Alien Registration Law of 1931,” American Jewish History 96, no. 2 ( June 2010): 109–40. In New York and beyond, Ruth Abusch-Magder, Jay Arena, Charlotte Brooks, Tamara Mose Brown, Katherine Chen, Jessica Cooperman, Huey Copeland, Marni Davis, Holly Dugan, Deborah Gambs, Howard Garland, Sylvia F. Garland, Idana Goldberg, Marion Jacobson, Rebecca Kobrin, Erica Lehrer, Kate Masur, Vanessa May, Carmen Menocal, Alex Molot, Cheli Morales, Leslie Paris, Josh Perlman, Jane Rothstein, Jordan Schildcrout, Alix Schwartz, Tracy Sivitz, Eliza Slavet, Jonathan Soffer, Nikki Stanton, Stephen Steinberg, Nick Syrett, Michael Terry, Amy Wan, and Grace Wang read parts of the manu- script and offered ideas for improvement. Tom Klug graciously shared his own expertise and sources on alien registration. Eckart Goebel bears the responsibil- ity for getting me to return to this project after a hiatus. There are some peo- ple who have worked with me on so many drafts and talked so often about the ideas in this book that whole sections of this work came about in collaboration with them, and anything that might be elegantly or intelligently formulated in those sections is very likely their doing: Tamar Barzel, Alisa Braun, Beth Dill, Jen Fronc, Eric Goldstein, Margie Weinstein, Karen Miller, Glenn Perusek, and