After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 takes readers back to the early decades of the twentieth century when anti-Semitism factored into public policy and Jewish individuals and organizations for the most part remained watchful and self-protective, carefully avoiding actions that might imperil their tenuous economic and social standing. Breaking new ground, Libby Garland argues that a historical view of immigration curtailment in the 1920s as a watershed moment has diverted attention from its continuation by other means. That is, not all Jews were content with restraint and the strictures of the law. Bringing to light fresh archival material and therefore making a signal contribution to immigration studies, the author explores the multifaceted phenomenon of illegal Jewish immigration.

Garland's point of departure is the immigration quota legislation passed by Congress in 1921 and even more restrictively in 1924 to control American borders and the racial profile of would-be Americans. Nativism and post-World War I nationalism were triumphant. Concern over the restrictive laws blocking their immigration to the United States later turned to desperation as European Jews sought escape from the tightening grip of Nazism. The likelihood of their inclusion in the limited quota after 1924 was remote, as the law apportioned few places to Jews, Italians, and Slavs, the undesirable peoples of eastern and southern Europe. An immigration that since 1881 had brought some two million Jews to American shores was reduced by law to near negligible numbers. In 1911, after four years of investigation, the Immigration Commission recommended cessation of the large-scale arrival of eastern and southern Europeans, regarded as inferior to the peoples of northwestern Europe. Their continuing settlement in the United States would, in the restrictionist view, form an unassimilable mass, threatening the biological and cultural vitality of the nation. Accordingly, American national borders had to be protected. The quota laws and the faulty scheme of racial classification that underlay them remained in force until their recission by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.

Forged documents, bribery, human smuggling, and other subterfuges succeeded in helping unknown numbers of European Jews to reach American shores. Some managed to evade detection at the Mexican or Canadian border before slipping across. Others stowed away on ships coming to Florida through the Caribbean, where established liquor-smuggling networks also trafficked in human cargo. Immigration and consular officials on both sides of the Atlantic might be suborned. Because wives and children of American citizens could immigrate independently of the narrow quota, conditions were rife for a criminal entrepreneur to bribe a local rabbi to certify him as the “husband” of a would-be immigrant. She might then procure a visa by paying off an American consular official. The network of illegality stretched widely, comprising shady characters in the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe – forgers, smugglers, con artists, and corrupt officials eager to profit from people frantic to leave Europe. Anxious kinsmen already in the United States, otherwise law-abiding and careful not to draw attention to themselves as Jews in those hyper-vigilant times, were also caught up in the illicit immigration. They were not reluctant to substantiate the false claims of distressed relatives.

The muddled scheme of human classification and ranking that underpinned the restrictive laws derived from nineteenth-century racial “science ” represented one of the ideological pillars of nativist opposition to immigration. Although the nineteenth-century racial hierarchy faced momentous challenge from an emergent American anthropology that systematically exposed the fallacies of race and eugenics, the older views emboldened powerful restrictionists on the Immigration Commission. The Chinese Exclusion Act had established the precedent of using race to define immigration policy in 1882. Clearly, populations not classified as “white” were at the severest disadvantage if they hoped to immigrate. Critical of racial classification, American Jewish organizations did not overtly challenge the view of Chinese and later Mexicans as an alien presence incapable of assimilation and thus subject to strict immigration control. Instead, Jewish spokesmen emphasized in various ways that Jews would not remain an alien group because they properly belonged to the “white” category and were thus fully capable of assimilation. Although once considered an unmalleable foreign intrusion, Jews were undergoing a process of “becoming white” that did not run its course until after World War II. The debilities of a persistent alien status continue to distort American attitudes and policies toward Mexican newcomers, as Garland appropriately demonstrates.

In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama's Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, Dan J. Puckett gives race even more prominence. Race resonates through every aspect of southern history, and a considerable strength of this study is its honest, unblinking discussion of how the southern racial ideology of white supremacy replicated Nazi racial thinking. Vicious and aggressive when challenged, proponents of white supremacy deprived American citizens of African descent of their most fundamental rights, just as Nazism dispossessed and brutalized Jews. Both worldviews motivated murderous violence against those considered racially inferior. Puckett writes of the stunning contradiction – “cognitive dissonance,” to use his clinical term – in white newspapers between their contempt for Nazism, on the one hand, and their embrace of white supremacy, on the other. Black newspapers, however, did not hesitate to link southern racism and Nazism, exposing the hypocrisy of the white press in denouncing the race hatred and undemocratic actions of the new rulers in Germany. But if white southerners and the southern press lived with an extreme contradiction, the disjunction between the condemnation of Nazism and their silent assent to Jim Crow was all the more dramatic for southern Jews. Whether Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox, their sons were experiencing anti-Semitism in the army and their towns were pervaded by anti-Semitism. At the same time, European Jews were facing annihilation in the name of race purity. Hate-filled anti-Semitic tirades also were broadcast in Alabama by a local priest little different but less well known than the Detroit demagogue Father Coughlin. This, too, sounded like Nazism, yet Jewish communities quietly carried on amid the most palpable incongruities.

Having established a comfortable middle-class life in Alabama's largest towns, German American Jews followed by Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe who would be the core of the Orthodox and Conservative congregations had to go along to get along. Their apartheid environment tolerated them as long as they did not disturb local mores, particularly regarding race. In this respect, southern Jewish communities were distinct from those in other parts of the country. The Jewish communities Puckett discusses differed little internally in regard to the peace they made with their Christian neighbors by not challenging white supremacy. Southern Jews in fact derived their own benefit from the racial ideology of their time and place. Paradoxically, the dominant position of southern Baptists and Methodists throughout Alabama and the South insured that an embedded religious anti-Semitism was pervasive since Jews rejected the most fundamental tenets of Christianity. Yet by adhering to racial customs befitting southern whites, the Jewish citizens of Alabama's towns became a familiar, accepted element. Some gained membership in civic organizations and even achieved elected office and wide political influence.

The famous Scottsboro case in which nine young African American men were accused in 1931 of raping two white women showed particularly well the consequences for Jews of flaunting racial custom. A torrent of anti-Semitic hatred, including newspaper editorials and threats, was directed at two courageous New York Jewish lawyers with communist ties that had arrived in Alabama to defend the young men. Those threats spilled over into the wider Jewish community and, accordingly, local Jewish figures publicly distanced themselves from the “outsiders.” An exceptional Montgomery rabbi who publicly supported the Scottsboro defendants and defied the admonition of the governing board of his temple to desist from protesting was dismissed. The mayor of Montgomery warned temple members of a possible Klan boycott of their businesses. In a statement to the press, the temple repudiated the rabbi and stated their support for segregation.

Although there were internal differences within and between Jewish groups, those divisions were steadily diminished by shared efforts to relieve the desperate conditions of Europe's Jews in the 1930s and the suffering of the surviving postwar remnant. Relatedly, the full horror of the Holocaust led Reform Jews, long opposed to Zionism, to make common purpose with other Jewish groups in supporting the founding of a Jewish state. The discussion of Alabama's Jewish communities, however, proceeds through often numbing detail.

While Puckett betrays some very parochial concerns absent in Garland's book, both volumes usefully expand the discussion of the chronically freighted issue of race in the United States. At the same time, they enhance understanding of how American Jews of diverse backgrounds and locales responded to pivotal events in twentieth-century American and European history.