American Jewish History

In March 1939, a few months before the outbreak of World War II, Margot Bloch, a Jewish refugee from Augsburg, Germany living in the chapter house of the Alpha Epsilon Phi (AEPhi) sorority at the University of Missouri, offered an assessment of her situation in a feature piece of the historically Jewish sorority’s periodical. Margot arrived on Missouri’s campus in 1937, fleeing Germany “after experiencing the transformation of a perfectly good-natured people into a flock of uncultured puppets whose strings are being pulled by a madman.”¹ She resumed her college studies in the United States under the auspices of AEPhi, in which she “found a new home” and expressed her gratitude “to the sorority for giving me this wonderful chance . . . I am learning how to act and think independently and, above all, how to act and think freely as an American citizen.”² Margot not only thanked the sorority for the material aid that it provided, but for acculturating her socially and politically into her new American surroundings.

Other recent refugees found similar opportunities to build new lives in America through sponsorship by collegiate Greek organizations. Max Wolfson, a native of Zöblen, Austria, contributed a brief testimony to the newspaper of the Phi Epsilon Pi (PhiEP) fraternity’s chapter at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1938. Max shared that he was “not [End Page 511] a member of the fraternity, but a guest in its house and here get my first and best opportunity to thank the whole fraternity for its hospitality. I have lived now about three months with them under one roof and have not felt like a stranger. At home I was always an opponent of fraternities but now I am a loyal convert to this institution.”³ At the end of Max’s submission, the fraternity chapter’s editors provided readers with a note. “Interested in photography, his job, and everything American, Max is a very pleasant addition to our group. Now working for the Atlanta Paper Co., he hopes to be followed soon by his brother and then the rest of his family in his migration to the ‘Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.’”⁴ Invoking the lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner, adapted as the country’s national anthem only years before in 1931, PhiEp testified to both the potential of their new houseguest’s ability to Americanize and the fraternity’s own good citizenship through American civic knowledge and philanthropic efforts at a time of global political and economic upheaval.

Max and Margot both appeared as success stories in the German Jewish student refugee programs set up by the national Jewish fraternities and sororities during the late 1930s, which aided those fleeing Nazi Germany and its occupied territories. These programs, in which at least four national Jewish fraternities and one Jewish sorority participated, could claim responsibility for taking in more than a hundred young scholars who began pursuing their studies in Central European universities, only to face expulsion or intimidation after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.⁵ Working with government officials, university administrators and a broad array of Jewish communal professionals, Jewish [End Page 512] fraternities and sororities provided participants with free tuition, room, board and a modest living allowance for the completion of their studies at an American college or university. The members of the Jewish Greek organizations that sponsored students through these programs took great pride in their philanthropic endeavors and showcased both “their” refugees and their own benevolence to the broader community as evidence of their humanitarianism and the ability of Jews to integrate into American society more generally.

While the refugee programs operated primarily to provide much-needed relief to imperiled youth from Central Europe, the German Jewish student refugee programs reflect middle-class American Jews’ own domestic struggles against antisemitism. The spirit of transnational Jewish solidarity, paradoxically, offered them a means by which to enhance their own social and political standing in American society in the years leading up to World War II...