Gentile New York seeks to shift the gaze of American Jewish history and historiography away from a view that Jewish immigrants, with few exceptions, embraced America and Americans, to a view that instead focuses on the ways in which those Jews articulated more complicated, less positive feelings about the people they met in the United States. Ribak believes that American Jewish historians have assumed that the new immigrants from Eastern Europe articulated a nearly universal embrace of America and its people. While those self-same Jews never hesitated to point out anti-Jewish activity and rhetoric in America, they articulated, according to the historical narrative, an unswerving love of America and Americans. Ribak set out to cull the primary sources written primarily in Yiddish, including newspapers, magazines, memoirs, oral histories, and poetry, as well as the personal papers of a variety of communal activists, to find in them the real story, the actual words and ideas about what America meant to them.

Ribak did his culling from the years of the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries. He began with the mass immigration which he dates, erroneously, to 1881, and then moves forward through the 1920s when the floods of immigration came to an end. He moves his analysis chronologically, detecting a shift in the early years of the twentieth century. Until then, Ribak claims, the immigrant Jews did in fact valorize and idealize the “Yankees,” the native-born Protestant middle and upper-middle classes whom they saw as refined and as standard-bearers of the nation. That romance, according to Gentile New York, began to fade at the start of the new century as Jewish immigrants began to perceive this elite as being antisemitic and hostile to them, the eastern European masses living in New York. As Jewish immigrants came to say more and more negative things about the Yankees and as their own political consciousness changed in large measure under the aegis of the labor movement, they developed more positive feelings about other immigrants, Italians in particular. Similarly, as their perspective changed they increasingly came to articulate solidarity with African-Americans, at the expense of the Yankees. In this transformation, the Jewish immigrants whose words are quoted here moved from a focus on self-defense to one that involved a defense of others, others with whom they believed they shared a political destiny.

Ribak uses particular moments in the history of New York City, such as the funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph in 1902 and the efforts of Christian evangelicals to operate within the New York City public schools, as well as national events—particularly the Red Scare of 1919–1920 with its attacks on radicals, some of whom happened to be Jewish, and increasing calls for the restriction of immigration—as the lightning rods which catalyzed the change in attitude. Whereas previously Jewish immigrants associated the native-born white population with refinement and high culture (much as they had seen Germans in Europe), later, as the Jews became more class-conscious and as the elite became, according to Ribak, more anti-immigrant, the Jewish immigrants instead cast their net horizontally, looking toward other Americans who occupied the same class position. By end of the period covered by the book, the immigrant Jewish masses, or those whose words Ribak read, experienced a political re-orientation. They did so not for ideological reasons, but because of historical circumstances that had taught them that they would do best by aligning with other minority groups rather than by associating themselves with the elite.

Ribak's intriguing thesis points out the need for American Jewish historians to think outside the boundaries of the Jewish world. Few studies have attempted to locate how Jews, immigrants or not, constructed the other people whom they encountered in America, and most scholarship still tends to look inward, focusing on intra-Jewish divisions and disputes. We probably did not need Gentile New York to tell us that Jewish immigrants, like all others, understood that in America they would, and did, come in contact with all sorts of people, and that the diversity of the population they encountered left its mark on them in different ways. But few scholars before Ribak have done much with that self-evident point. While a robust literature on Jews and African-Americans exists, it needs much more work, and the field cries out for studies of Jewish-Irish, Jewish-Italian interaction, on both the level of image and action. This book might possibly push American Jewish historians to broaden and complicate the scope of their visions.

But this book suffers from numerous flaws and these might lessen its potential usefulness in redirecting the scholarly trajectory. First, and most problematically, this book is based on a methodology that could be described as cherry-picking. Ribak went through an enormous amount of material and plucked out of this source and that source a word, a thought, a reference here or there that sustained his point. Those same newspapers, poems, letters, and magazines, inter alia, may just as likely contain (and having been through many of them myself, I would say, do contain) words, thoughts, or references that make the opposite point. What this book lacks is balance; it reads like a work whose author knew a priori what he wanted to argue, and then went out gleaning the primary sources to find the phrases that fit.

Ribak cannot prove that these words reflected the sentiments of a broad base of the Jewish immigrant population, nor does the book actually convince that this flood of words about the various non-Jews whom immigrant Jews engaged with in New York had any resonance beyond the written page. As such, the most important problem with the book is that it pays singular attention to words and images, at the expense of behaviors and deeds. We learn nothing about Jewish interactions, institutionally and on the informal street level, with Italian, Irish, and African-American New Yorkers. Did Jews seek to live in the neighborhoods where these minorities lived? When Jewish immigrants moved out of the areas of first settlement did they opt to live near these others with whom Ribak contends they came to see a common field of interest? Did Jewish parents want to send their children to schools that enrolled the children from these communities?

The answer in fact was no. Jewish immigrants may have become disillusioned by Yankees, Ribak's repeated word of choice which assumes this to be a real group (he also uses the offensive “WASP” repeatedly), but when it came to deciding how to educate their children and comport themselves institutionally in public, they modeled themselves against the elite. They aspired to send their children to the schools dominated by the elite. They sought to acquire the language of the elite. Their affiliation with progressivism brought them into the political context with the elite, and while they interacted politically with individuals from the various other immigrant communities, Italians in particular, they identified themselves with native-born progressives, first and foremost.

Finally, the book suffers much from its repetition of “must,” “likely,” and “should be,” an indication that the alleged significance of expressions about non-Jews in the primary sources is speculative. Ribak has done a tremendous job in mining the sources, uncovering new ones, and making use of those that are well known, but the project ultimately does not hold together and the argument does not convince.