{"id":372,"date":"2011-02-10T23:26:05","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T04:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/"},"modified":"2011-07-03T18:02:34","modified_gmt":"2011-07-03T22:02:34","slug":"relations","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/kennebec\/relations\/","title":{"rendered":"Jewish-Gentile Relations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Change Over Time:\u00a0 Jewish-Gentile Relations in Waterville<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

by Miles de Klerk \u201913 (January 2011)<\/em>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

When I went to public school in Waterville, the elementary years, there was no distinctions. You didn\u2019t even think about stuff like that, you just went to school, you had friends and you were all young.\u00a0 High school started\u2026 you realized there were different groups in Waterville, different nationalities. The Franco-Americans, the Lebanese, and the Jews, the three groups were not competitive when I went.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was the experience of Peter Beckerman, a Waterville native, as he moved through the community\u2019s schools during the \u201950s and \u201960s.\u00a0 His story is similar to those of others who grew up or raised children in Waterville during that time period.\u00a0 One who looks further back into Waterville\u2019s Jewish history, however, will find that things were not always that way.\u00a0 For Jews growing up in Waterville during the \u201920s, \u201930s and into the \u201940s, things were worse.\u00a0 The Talberth sisters, Ethel and Sue, recall their experiences growing up in Waterville as \u201cnasty\u201d and \u201cvery difficult.\u201d\u00a0 This gives you an idea of just how different things were for these earlier generations of Jews.\u00a0 There is a distinct pattern of decreasing intensity in antisemitic interactions from the 1920s to the 1960s; this cannot be denied.\u00a0 What I have found is that while this pattern can be traced throughout the general experience of Jews living in Waterville during this time period, the experiences of children are especially telling.\u00a0 For this reason, I have chosen to focus on the nature of Jewish-gentile interactions in the schools and on the sports fields, the two places where Jewish children had the most contact with their gentile neighbors.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNasty\u201d and \u201cVery Difficult\u201d: The 1920s, \u201930s, and \u201940s<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

Now, let\u2019s move back in time to 1920s Waterville, in order to take a look at the \u201cnasty\u201d and \u201cvery difficult\u201d experiences of the Talberth sisters.\u00a0 As one might assume from their comments about the nature of their experience growing up in Waterville, many of the interactions that these girls had with their gentile classmates and teachers were quite unpleasant.\u00a0 Ethel recalls how, going to Waterville high school in the late 1920s, she was excluded from participating in sports because she was Jewish.<\/span><\/p>\n

I loved sports.\u00a0 And, in order to engage in them, I had to bow down to the Catholic people. One would say, \u201cIf you want me to vote for you, you have to scrub coals\u2014you\u2019re Jewish.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Sue was asked to talk about her experiences in the schools her immediate answer was simply, \u201cbad, very bad.\u201d\u00a0 When asked to elaborate, she goes on to say that because of her Jewish identity she was completely excluded by her classmates. \u201cWell, we weren\u2019t considered anything, never given any honors or any positions or anything.\u00a0 Very bad.\u201d\u00a0 More striking than either of these stories is another of Ethel\u2019s, one where she had particularly nasty interaction not only with a student, but a teacher as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the Catholic boys came down and said, \u201cI want to ride your bicycle.\u201d\u00a0 And I said, \u201cYou can\u2019t, it\u2019s my brother\u2019s.\u201d\u00a0 He said, \u201cYou dirty Jew!\u00a0 You Christ-killer!\u201d And I said, \u201cI don\u2019t know who Christ is, but I know you can\u2019t take the bike.\u201d\u00a0 The following day I went to my history teacher in school and said that this boy said that I was a dirty Jew and I killed Christ. \u201cThe history book says Christ was killed by the Romans, I don\u2019t know what he was talking about!\u201d\u00a0 She said, \u201cThere was a misprint: he was right.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the single most striking story that I found in my research.\u00a0 Not only do we see intense name-calling, including \u201cdirty Jew\u201d and \u201cChrist killer,\u201d the two nastiest names I encountered, we see a gentile teacher, an adult, taking advantage of the ignorance of a child to make her feel bad about her Jewish identity.\u00a0 The stories of the Talberth sisters paint a rather bleak picture for the nature of Jewish-gentile interactions in Waterville. Fortunately, things seem to improve for Waterville\u2019s Jews, but not significantly, before Burt Shiro moved through the schools.<\/span><\/p>\n

When prompted to talk about his experiences with gentile teachers starting in the late 1930s, Burt Shiro has this to say: \u201cThere were the most people, most people I had in school, they were very good, but there were a few who were actually prejudiced against the Jews.\u00a0 And that\u2019s too bad, but that\u2019s the way it was.\u201d\u00a0 Following this, Burt goes on to talk extensively about is experiences with gentiles as a child in Waterville, and it seems that every one includes some type of physical altercation.\u00a0 Burt was also very involved in sports, something that the Shiros claim was wrought with antisemitism.\u00a0 Burt\u2019s experiences with antisemitism on the sports fields and courts was not uncommon.\u00a0 Peter Beckerman, a nephew of Burt\u2019s who grew up in the 1950s and \u201960s, recalls the experiences of his uncles when they played high school basketball.<\/span><\/p>\n

When my uncles went, even though they all played on the same teams, you\u2019ll hear stories about the Lebanese who would pass the ball mostly to Lebanese or spoke some Lebanese on the basketball court. When I grew up I didn\u2019t see any of that, the distinctions were there and we had fun with them.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

During the 1930s and \u201940s, Waterville\u2019s ethnic groups were still quite divided, even when playing on the same teams.\u00a0 Also supplied in this quote is the idea that things are getting better for Wateville\u2019s Jews, something that cannot be ignored as we move out of the 1940s and into the \u201950s and \u201960s.<\/span><\/p>\n

A Time of Improvement: The 1950s and \u201960s<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

Peter Beckerman\u2019s experience is strikingly different from that of the Talberth sisters and Burt Shiro. It is, howver, fairly similar to the experiences of other children growing up in Waterville during the postwar years.\u00a0 Phyllis Shiro describes the nature of antisemitism when she moved to Waterville with Burt shortly after World War II.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure many people have subtle incidences of antisemitism. It was never flagrant, it was ignorant people who make stupid remarks.\u00a0 My children can tell you many incidences where comments were made, something about being Jewish.\u00a0 Like a basketball coach saying to my son, \u201cI though Jews were smart.\u201d\u00a0 You know, comments like that, sort of an undercurrent.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This idea of an undercurrent of discrimination against Jews is common among stories from this era.\u00a0 Phyllis notes that her sons, who were very involved with sports, experienced much more of this undercurrent while playing on sports teams, while their daughter managed to avoid much of it by staying off the fields.\u00a0 But even though they had some troubles, the Shiros note that their children had an excellent experience growing up in Waterville.<\/span><\/p>\n

Judy Brody, who claimed to have felt fully assimilated with her gentile classmates in the Waterville schools, was able to participate in theater and other extracurricular activities without fear of discrimination by her classmates. She even rose to leadership positions in some of the clubs.\u00a0 Gordon and Myrtle Wolman recall that they had no problems with antisemitism when they raised their children in Waterville during the postwar years, something that struck them as odd, given the contrast of their own childhood experiences in Waterville and elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

Going back to the vicious name-calling that went on during the Talberth sisters\u2019 time in the schools, we see another significant contrast from the experience of Peter Beckerman in a continuation of his earlier quote regarding his uncles\u2019 experiences on the basketball court.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I grew up I didn\u2019t see any of that. The distinctions were there and we had fun with them. They weren\u2019t ignored or unknown like they were in elementary school. We actually, as I said, had fun\u2026 totally politically incorrect. I mean\u2026 I might be called by my good friends, just joking around, \u201cbagel eater.\u201d We might call a Lebanese a \u201ccamel jockey.\u201d They didn\u2019t even know what a bagel was or if I ever ate a bagel, and certainly they\u2019ve never been on a camel and, you know, didn\u2019t associate themselves back in Lebanon with the desert, but we had fun with it. You know, fake foolish French accents with foolish phraseologies, we\u2019re not really kind, but we all laughed, we had a good time with the differences\u2026 It was almost flattering that they recognized you were a part of a tribe you were proud of, if it was jokey or not.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here we see name-calling taking on a different form, a more benign and friendly form, from what it was for the Talberth sisters and Pat Hillson Goldman, who recalls her brother being called a \u201cChrist killer\u201d as a very young child in the 1930s.\u00a0 For Peter, \u201cbagel eater\u201d is a term of endearment: it marks him as a member of a special community, not an inferior one.<\/span><\/p>\n

While some things went from terrible to great for the Jews between the \u201920s and the \u201960s, others simply went from awful to annoying.\u00a0 A specific example of this type of smaller improvement comes from Paula Lunder, whose children faced punishment in school for missing class due to religious holidays.\u00a0 Paula attempted to have the school add several Jewish holidays to their calendar. \u00a0Her request, however, was denied by multiple people, including the school secretary, a friend of hers.<\/span><\/p>\n

I always wanted the Jewish holidays to be put on the school calendar. So I went to the high school, this was when my kids were in high school, so I went to their school, and I spoke to the person who was in charge of the scheduling and the calendar. I said, \u201cI would like to enter these dates as important Jewish dates.\u201d \u00a0It was Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. \u00a0Not allowed at all. \u00a0Not allowed. \u00a0And she was a friend of mine. She said, \u201cNo, we don\u2019t do that; those dates do not belong on our calendar.\u201d \u00a0I said, \u201cI want my children\u2019s religion to be respected. I want my children to be understood, and their beliefs respected.\u201d She said, \u201cthat\u2019s not our problem.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously, this story doesn\u2019t paint a picture of tolerance on the part of the administration of Waterville\u2019s public schools, but these interactions are far more benign than those that Ethel Talberth and Burt Shiro recounted.\u00a0 In their cases we saw gentile adults targeting Jewish children with unadulterated discrimination. In the \u201960s we simply see a refusal to accept the Jewish religion in schools\u2014still bad, still insensitive, but this simply isn\u2019t the flagrant antisemitism that Ethel experienced in the \u201920s.\u00a0 Finally, while the Shiro boys may have had some problems with antisemitic undercurrents on the sports fields, their nephew Peter Beckerman again shares a more positive story, this time about the football league that he ran as a child.<\/span><\/p>\n

I found it the other day again: a list of pick-up football, sand lot football\u2026 That list had absolutely no distinctions for anyone who was around to play; it was a list of everybody in the entire area of Waterville that would walk or bicycle. Looking at that list, there was everybody on it from White Anglo Protestants to the French. It made no distinctions, it went right down, whoever was able to come and play was on that list.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No discrimination, no distinctions, if you can get to the games, you can play.\u00a0 That\u2019s the message Peter Beckerman was sending as he organized sports during the \u201960s, and it\u2019s the same message he sends today, still organizing pick-up sporting events in Waterville.\u00a0 When contrasted with Ethel\u2019s story of exclusion from sports by her Catholic classmates simply for being Jewish, this story shows us how much the nature of Jewish-gentile interactions shifted between the interwar years to the postwar era.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Accounts for the Improvement in Jewish-Gentile Relations?<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

So what accounts for this pattern? Why did antisemitism get less intense as time went on?\u00a0 In her study of the city of Bangor, Maine, Judith Goldstein notes a similar type of pattern.\u00a0 She discusses the rise in antisemitism in the 1920s that grew throughout the Depression, a time when Americans by and large were feeling the stress of financial decline and acted accordingly.\u00a0 She goes on to describe how this growing antisemitism was represented nationally by the restrictions on Jewish immigrants, quotas for Jewish students at colleges and universities and groups like the Klu Klux Klan that aimed to keep the Jews down (Goldstein 101).\u00a0 Goldstein notes that this racism continues throughout the interwar years, culminating at the dawn of World War II in more flagrant demonstrations against Jews (Goldstein 119), something that was also felt in Waterville by Burt Shiro.\u00a0 He recalls an incident where a man walked down the street after the United States\u2019 announcement of entrance into World War II, yelling, \u201cKill the Jews!\u00a0 Kill the Jews!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Goldstein goes on to talk about the effects of World War II and the improvements that Jews saw in Bangor during this time, and in some cases even earlier.\u00a0 Goldstein notes that in the late 1930s, general antisemitism had declined to the point that many women were able to take up leadership positions in non-Jewish clubs, something that was completely unheard of before this time (Goldstein 100). A similar phenomenon is noted by the Wolmans, who claim that there was much less sentiment for antisemitism among gentiles in the early to mid \u201940s, especially after World War II.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, while there are similarities between the histories of Jewish-gentile interactions in these towns, they cannot be labeled as the same.\u00a0 Even if they could be, Goldstein offers no overarching explanation for the changes that occurred, attributing them to social changes that occurred nationwide, if to anything at all.\u00a0 I too am unable to supply an overarching explanation for the nature of these Jewish-gentile interactions.\u00a0 They seem to follow national trends at some times, and ones specific to small towns at others, and sometimes don\u2019t seem to follow any trend at all.\u00a0 What I have gleaned from this realization is that we\u2019re missing part of the picture.\u00a0 I strongly suspect that the answers that we are seeking do not lie in a more in-depth look at the stories of Waterville\u2019s Jews, but of the experiences of the people on other side of these interactions, namely the gentile community of Waterville.\u00a0 Without their side of the story, their experiences with Jews and information about how their preconceptions about this ethnic minority were formed and shaped these interactions, I fear that we will never have the entire picture that we seek.\u00a0 For this reason, what you have read here is very much a work in progress: one side of the story has been presented, and I hope to explore the others in order to explain the interesting nature of Jewish-gentile relations in Waterville, Maine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Print Source<\/span><\/h3>\n

Goldstein, Judith S.\u00a0Crossing lines : Histories of jews and gentiles in three communities<\/em>. New York: Morrow, 1992.<\/span><\/p>\n

Interviews<\/span><\/h3>\n

Beckerman, Peter.\u00a0 Interview by Isadora Alteon.\u00a0 14 January 2011.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Brody, Judy.\u00a0 Interview by Jena Hershkowitz.\u00a0 19 January 2010.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Goldman, Pat Hillson.\u00a0 Interview by Tendai M\u2019ndange-Pfupfu.\u00a0 9 January 2011. <\/span><\/p>\n

Lunder, Paula.\u00a0 Interview by Yichen Jiang.\u00a0 9 January 2011.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Shiro, Burton and Phyllis.\u00a0 Interview by Samuel Levine.\u00a0 17 January 2010.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Shiro, Burton and Phyllis.\u00a0 Interview by Miles de Klerk.\u00a0 18 January 2011.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Talberth, Ethel and Sue.\u00a0 Interview by David Freidenreich.\u00a0 21 December 2010. <\/span><\/p>\n

Wolman, Gordon and Myrtle.\u00a0 Interview by Hasan Bhatti.\u00a0 21 January 2010.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Change Over Time:\u00a0 Jewish-Gentile Relations in Waterville by Miles de Klerk \u201913 (January 2011) When I went to public school in Waterville, the elementary years, there was no distinctions. You didn\u2019t even think about stuff like that, you just went to school, you had friends and you were all young.\u00a0 High school started\u2026 you realized…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"parent":4,"menu_order":13,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/372"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":375,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/372\/revisions\/375"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/jewsinmaine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}