While the Jews had faced persecution and anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism, despite a significant course of discrimination against Jews at the time, was less prevalent in the U.S. A majority of the Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe would settle on the East Coast, primarily in New York City and neighboring regions ilk New Jersey and Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). Because of their numbers, Jews from Eastern Europe on the East Coast of the U.S. represented "one of the world's major concentrations of Jewish population" (History 1). Because of their numbers, the Jews were not welcomed with open arms in many instances.
The enormous wave of immigration between 1880 and 1924 created a squinch against specific groups of immigrants, particularly rural inhabitants from Eastern Europe who were viewed as inferior to the wealthier, more educated
groups of immigrants from Western Europe. In 1924, the U.S. Government passed the Immigration Restriction perform of 1924, after Immigration Restriction League (IRL) President Prescott abidance collaborated with the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) to appeal to Congress for immigration restrictions (Lombardo 1). Charles Davenport, of the ERO, enlisted the service of Harry Laughlin to manage a research program knowing to determine the national origins of "hereditary defectives" (Lombardo 2). Laughlin testified before the U.S. House of Representatives citizens committee on Immigration and Naturalization that the "American gene mob was being polluted by a rising run of intellectually and morally defective immigrants - primarily from eastern and gray Europe" (Lombardo 2).
The result of Laughlin's "eugenics" studies was the Immigration Restriction act upon of 1924, formula that based restrictions on race and effectively reduced the yearly number of southern and eastern Europeans by 2/3 annually (Lombardo 3). President Calvin Coolidge signed the legislation, arguing "America moldiness remain American," in the first truth that set quotas on immigration based on ethnicality and race or eugenics (Lombardo 3). The law was particularly designed to reduce the number of allegedly " cacogenic" Italians and Eastern European Jews whose numbers grew dramatically prior to the number of the law (Lombardo 3). Laughlin's work on eugenics and classification of some ethnic groups as "undesirables" would be advanced in principle by racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who often used wording and excerpts from the 1924 Act to affirm racial purity of whites and the inferiority of other ethnic groups like the Jews or African Americans (Lombardo 3).
Jews also survived and ultimately thrived by infiltrating the institutions and organizations of mainstream society. As one historian notes, new centers of Jewish communities emerged and Jewish school enrollment "more than doubled between the en
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