 Good evening everyone and welcome to the Joan and Henry Katz lecture in Judaic Studies, an annual lecture sponsored by Fairfield University's Bennett Center for Judaic Studies. This lecture series is made possible through the great generosity of Debbie and David Zief, honoring the late Joan and Henry Katz. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Dr. Ellen Umanski, the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor of Judaic Studies at Fairfield University and Founding Director of the University's Bennett Center for Judaic Studies, the oldest Judaic Studies Center at any of the 27 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. I am delighted to introduce this evening our speaker, Dr. Kirsten from Aglish, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University. She has been at MSU since 2001. Dr. from Aglish received her BA from Columbia University and her PhD in history from New York University. Her scholarly work includes American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares, Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, published in 2006 by Brandeis University Press. A book that looks at Holocaust consciousness as seen in the writings of four well-known secular Jewish intellectuals in the early 1960s. She's the co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, The Feminist Mystique, which traces the cultural and historical significance of Friedan's work 50 years after its initial publication in 1963. And she is the author of A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, a history of Jewish name changing in America, published by NYU Press in 2018 and recipient of the American Jewish Historical Society's 2019 Saul Weiner Prize for the Best Book in American Jewish History. Kirsten from Aglish is currently co-editor with Adam Mendelssohn and Daniel Sawyer of the Scholarly Journal, American Jewish History. She has published in the Journal of American History, American Jewish History, The Michigan Historical Review, Southern Jewish History, and several edited volumes. She has won fellowships and grants from several organizations, including EVO, The Poison Foundation, and the Association for Jewish Studies. In 2011, Kirsten received a legacy heritage grant from the Association for Jewish Studies, which supported a year of programming at MSU in 2011-2012 on the theme, Telling Family Stories, Jews, Genealogy, and History. She also co-curated with Ken Walter a 2002-2003 MSU Museum exhibit entitled, An Easy Years, Michigan Jewry During Depression and More, that was recognized by the Michigan Council for the Humanities as among the top 30 projects that the Council has supported in 30 years. Dr. from Aglish's talk tonight will focus on some of the major theses of her recent book, A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, and she will give many examples of Jewish name changing that will bring her theses to life. Who knew that New York City's civil corporate petitions could prove to be so enlightening? My deep thanks to Jennifer Hanoes, Program Manager of the Venice Center for Judaic Studies, and Anthony Santora from Fairfield University's Media Center for all of the hard work that they put in to making tonight's webinar a reality. And my thanks again to David and Debbie Zief for their great support, as well as to Kirsten from Aglish for being with us this evening. Tonight's lecture will be followed by a Q&A session. If you have any questions that you'd like to ask Dr. from Aglish, please put them in the Q&A box, not the chat box, but the Q&A box anytime during or after the lecture. And Dr. from Aglish will get to as many of them as possible after her talk. And now, although I'm sad that she and I are not getting to see one another in person this evening, I'm still enormously happy and grateful that she is with us. So please join me in virtually welcoming from her home in East Lansing, Michigan, Dr. Kirsten from Aglish, to speak on the topic Too Long, Too Foreign, Too Jewish, The Rise of Jewish Name Changing, 1917 through 1942. Kirsten. Well, thank you so very much, Ellen. Thank you for that lovely introduction. And thank you so much for inviting me to speak. I am really disappointed that I was not able to actually meet me in person and to speak in person, which I would have been really just wonderful. I'm from the East Coast and I would have really just loved to be able to be out back in Connecticut and to see people, but it's really an honor and it's really exciting to be able to be here with people virtually and to have to be able to reach out to so many people who are spending your evening with me. So it's it's really wonderful and I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with so many people. I want to, you know, absolutely thank Ellen, particularly for inviting me to give this talk. I'd like to thank Jennifer Hanoes and Anthony Sartoro for helping to make this possible. It's been wonderful. I especially like to thank Don Debi and David Zief, who've helped to fund the CATS lecture. I've gotten a chance to meet them virtually and it's been really just such a pleasure. So I just I'm so thrilled that you're giving me the chance to talk about my research and I'm going to get started. And I look forward to please do put questions in the Q&A and I'm really, really happy to talk with people after this. So I'm going to share my screen. So so the title of the talk is Too Long to Foreign to Jewish. And this is basically sort of the first third of my my longer book of Rosenberg by any other name. So I usually start if we were if we were in person right now, which I gave a few a few talks in person with this before we all went into our hiding spaces. I usually start off by asking people how many people have someone in their family who's changed their name, how many people know someone who's changed their name and, you know, I'd get people to raise their hands and, you know, by the end, everyone has their hand up. And that's kind of my way of starting by saying, you know, name changing is just an integral part of American culture and American Jewish culture. Anecdotes and jokes and folklore are everywhere about about name changing in American Jewish life and in American life. And what I think is really interesting is the ways that the anecdotes and jokes and kind of stories about name changing have really shaped our understandings of name changing. This was true before I started this research project. And it's actually it's kind of how I like to start off as just kind of by thinking and having us probe some of these stories that I think kind of form the way we think about name changing. So I'm going to start off with three popular images of name changing in American Jewish culture. There we go. So the first story comes from Edward G. Robinson's memoir, All My Yesterdays, an immigrant from Bucharest, Romania. Robinson changed his name from Emmanuel Goldenberg as an 18 year old drama student when he said, quote, in his memoir, it was suggested to me ever so tactfully that the name that Emmanuel Goldenberg was not a name foreign actor, too long, too foreign, and I suspect too Jewish. Although he says the thought of changing it was unpleasant, somehow a denial of my beginning, somehow unfaithful to my mother and my father and my five brothers, he searched for a new, amending name and adopted his middle initially as, quote, my priory treaty with the past. And if you don't know that story, you probably know other, you know, movie star name change stories. That's generally the most common and the thing that, you know, everybody wanted to know if I was going to be talking about in my book the first, the first moment they heard what I was writing about. The second story is actually a really popular joke. And again, if we were in person, probably half the audience would be like repeating the punchline with me as I said it, because it's really popular and a lot of people know it. So and we'll give this kind of image to go along with it. So there's a Jewish immigrant who enters America at Alice Islands and he's processed according to the standard procedures, but they are very confusing to him. He is overwhelmed by the noise and the bustle. And one of the officials was your name. He replied, I shame for guessing in Yiddish. I've already forgotten. And so the official then recorded his name as Sean Ferguson or Shane Ferguson, depending on on the version, you know. And then the third story is actually a scene from the popular film Hester Street. I use a lot of movies in this. I love movies and I know a lot of my audiences. A lot of times people have seen these movies. Hester Street is a dramatization of the Abraham Cajon novel, Yackel. Yackel is an immigrant who's been in the country for several years and he's tried to shed his old world life completely. Calls himself Jake. He prides self on his Yankee clothes and his knowledge of American culture and the English language. When his father dies, he sends for his wife, played by Carol Kane here, and his son, but he's embarrassed of their green horn status. And he shuns his wife for a beautiful, more assimilated woman. And his wife, Gittle, feels rejected and confused. And the name change is kind of a symbol of the distance between them, right, and her inability to understand who he is and how he's changed. And I don't know whether you know these specific stories, but I would imagine that at least one or two of them sound familiar to you. But what I want to point out for you, what I think is really interesting about them is that even though they're really, really different stories, they all share similarity. I'll emphasize name changing as a profoundly individual activity. In the case of Edward G. Robinson and all stories of movie star name changes, the name change is the act of an extraordinary individual, someone who is extinguished by talent or beauty or charisma, right? Immigrant Sean Ferguson's name change on the end is the result of profound isolation. His name is changed because he's a lonely individual and he has no understanding of or connections to his new culture and he has no one to aid him in navigating the system, right? And then finally, in Hester Street, name changing is identified with a young, shallow man who wants to just abandon his family and his roots and remake himself entirely in the new world, right? All three of these stories and these images suggest that name changing was an act that was entered into by individuals who were isolated or escaping from or betraying Jewish families and the Jewish community. So in contrast with these three popular stories, and I'll say that when I walked into doing my research, I kind of have these stories in my head. You know, I didn't really know what I was going to find. I was just kind of fascinated by the idea of name changes. But I think that they really are kind of powerfully shaping, have powerfully shaped the way we see what a name changes or the way we think about it. And so in contrast with these popular images, I'd like to offer you another actually probably more common story of name changing in America. In 1932, a man named Max Greenberger petitioned the city court of the city of New York to allow himself as well as two of his four children to change their last name to Green. One of Greenberger's grounds for the petition was that the name Greenberger is a foreign sounding name and is not conducive to securing good employment as a musician. Another ground, another ground was that the name Greenberger is not helpful towards securing an appointment as an intern in a hospital. That was the chosen profession of one of his sons. His daughter was looking to become a musician. Greenberger's petition was one of thousands that were submitted in the middle of the 20th century to the New York City Civil Court. Men, women and children like the Greenbergers legally changed their ethnic sounding names to less ethnically identifiable ones. And until the 1960s, Jewish names were represented disproportionately among the among names being changed in New York City. Yet surprisingly, I thought when I first started doing my search, historians really have not seriously considered the significance of name changing in American or in American Jewish life. Scholars of American life, for the most part, have tended to take name changing for granted and to refer to its existence very casually, a page or two, or maybe just in a sentence, note that somebody changed their names. My book is actually the first in-depth historical work to be written about any group changing their name in the United States. I think that's a shame. I mean, it was good for me, but it's a shame because I think that by exploring the actual practice of name changing in more depth, we can really understand so much more about the lives of American Jews. The fact that Max Greenberger was not a young single man seeking to escape his Jewish past and succeed in an elite non-Jewish world, nor was he a hapless immigrant caught up by circumstances. But instead, he was a middle-aged father seeking to improve his family's economic status. And I think that the degree to which name changing was a voluntary group activity entered into by thousands of Jewish men, women and children. It was a strategy of class mobility that Jewish families embraced in large numbers in the middle of the 20th century. Ironically, that strategy illustrated Jews' economic comfort in the United States. The Greenberger children were not searching for manual labor, right? As much as it illustrated Jewish weakness and identifiable Jewish name was not helpful in securing good employment. Ultimately, name changing was that permitted Jewish families to attain and to strengthen their position in the American middle class. But that position came at a psychological and a communal cost. So I'm going to talk a little bit. So in my research, I examined, I'm going to talk a little bit about kind of the materials that I used and give you kind of a sense of the process that I used to do my research. And I'm happy to talk more about this during Q&A. So I examined name change petitions filed in the city court of the city of New York from 1887 through 2012. So over a century of name changing. And I'm happy, as I say, to talk more about any element of that research in more depth as well as the methodology, the ways that I went through the petitions and how I how I analyzed them. It is important to note that I did look at other sources. I looked at Jewish organizational archives like the National Jewish Welfare Board and the American Jewish Congress. But the bulk of my findings were focused in New York City in these name change petitions. And that is partially because New York City, to be frank, offered me access to those records in a way that, like, Detroit, for example, was not willing to do. These materials are still in the civil court. I actually went to the civil court to do this research. And that's the case throughout most of the country. Name change materials are still in court and they're not set up to do the kind of normal work that historians do. So I had to get kind of special permission and special access. So that's a part of the reason that I looked in New York a lot of times when I speak to people in Connecticut or anywhere in the country other than New York, they want to know why I looked in New York. And so that's one reason was that I was really able to look at the materials in a way that a lot other places wouldn't necessarily allow me to. But then the other reason is that the research took a long time looking through a century of these material materials and thousands and thousands of petitions took quite a long time. And I like to tell people, although my pictures over messed up a little bit, I started this research years and years ago when my son was two years old and I didn't want to be away from him for the multiple weeks and months that it would take to do this kind of research. And I'm from the New York area, so I brought him with me. But the difference in the pictures can show you that it took a long time. A daughter came around, she came to the for the research as well. So this is the product of a lot of time, a lot of research. And there were some practical decisions made, but there were also good reasons to be looking at New York as a city with that had so many Jews in it. It's actually fairly striking that so many people would feel uncomfortable enough with their names that they felt the need to change them. And so even though there were there were some practical reasons I chose to to research New York, I think it also really tells us a lot about the upper mobility and antisemitism. I wanted before I start to get my talk, I also would like to just briefly note that I'm looking at official legal name changing, kind of formal name changing that you would do in court. And that's a voluntary activity that is very, very different from a lot of people's understandings of name changing. Many individuals believe that their families' names were changed at Ellis Island when their ancestors entered the country. So most historians and immigration historians that this kind of mass involuntary name changing at Ellis Island simply did not take place. This picture actually is kind of an interesting place to kind of start off and look if you look and I'll try and put my cursor. I don't know if you can see that. But if you look, people are being called up to officials. And if you notice, they have these very large books there. Those are the ship manifest. If you're here and you've ever done any genealogical research, you will probably know what those manifests look like. They will look like this. I mean, this comes from this comes from microfilm, but it's it's available at ancestry.com. It's something that, you know, a lot of genealogists look at. This is the page that those officials are looking at. You can see it's all written in the same hand. It's these are the ship manifest that were produced before immigrants actually arrived at Ellis Island, right? And you can see little checkmarks. If you look very closely, you can see checkmarks next to a lot of things. Officials are asking questions. They have translators to translate the answers. And they are simply checking people out. They are not asking questions like what is your name? Moreover, immigrants did not leave Ellis Island with any official documentation of any kind that would that would bind them to a new name. American law gave no power to inspectors to determine individuals' names. And I'll note that my main change petitions are filled with nonimmigrants with native born Americans. It is certainly possible that a few rogue inspectors recommended to immigrants that they change their names or that they even wrote a different name on the immigrants tags when they were detained at Ellis Island and that immigrants may be misunderstood these activities as permanent acts of the US government. But there's really little to no evidence that there was mass systematic involuntary name changing at Ellis Island. And instead, there is actually much evidence of voluntary name changing in court petitions and also in naturalization petitions. And that's probably where most immigrants changed their names. So I'm going to talk more about the voluntary official name changing in this paper, which was coincidentally done primarily by native born Americans. And I'm going to talk mostly about these court petitions here. If you want to talk more about this in the Q&A, I'm certainly happy to do that. I know that it's hard to be talking about something that goes against sometimes people's family histories, and I understand that. So if that's, you know, I'm happy to talk more about that. So I'm going to offer you here four arguments tonight. So one argument is that during the years between World War One and World War Two, New Yorkers began to file name change petitions in numbers that were double, triple and quadruple those before the war. It's really, really striking. These years really between 1917, 1945, 1946, the years I'm going to talk about are really just the name changing just shoots up dramatically. I'm also going to offer the argument that Jews were overwhelmingly and disproportionately represented in these petitions. So New Yorkers and broadly, I look not just at Jewish petitions. I looked at petitions from all different groups, right? But Jews are overwhelmingly disproportionately represented in those petitions. So the question is why and I'm going to argue for you that in part Jews upward mobility helps to explain this phenomenon. But I'm going to also argue also that anti-Semitism further helps to argue this. And I have this picture, which maybe I should have held it earlier on, that sort of shows both this upward mobility. It shows Jews moving into kind of white collar secretarial work that pays better, is a little bit easier than factory work. And those kinds of jobs that Jewish women in particular are really looking for and helps to explain some of some of the reasons that Jews change their names. Jewish women are also being kept out of these jobs in large numbers. And that that's kind of the dynamic I'm going to be speaking for. So let me start with the first point. So why does why do the numbers of name change petitions rise exponentially in the years really during and between the wars? 1917 to 1945, 46. Oh, dear, so I'll go back to this for a second. So during immigrant generation, during sort of the early years when immigrants came to the United States, they actually frequently did change their names, but they did so quickly and unofficially. If you immigrant memoirs, they're filled with like snaps, you know, people in their apartments or, you know, in city streets in their sweatshop, you know, they're sitting around talking to people and, you know, Jewish immigrants have already been here for a couple of years, say, oh, change your name. That's no good. You know, you don't want to you don't want people to be pestering you. That's a greenhorn name. Take this name. And they do. They take on new names. They can do so unofficially. American government allows them to do that. You can change your name now, actually, unofficially, just like that. And if you call yourself that persistently, that can be your name. As a growing government bureaucracy in the 20th century, however, began to track individuals who needed to pay taxes, who needed to serve in the military, receive welfare benefits. Names came to take on much more social, political and economic significance. Ordinary individuals increasingly found it necessary or desirable to change their names officially in order to receive benefits like welfare benefits and to avoid penalties. So the years between 1917, 1945 and the era of two world wars, depression and the growth of the welfare state, witnessed a huge boom in name changing. And it's during those years that Jews change their names, right? So everybody's changing their names. Lots and lots of people are changing their names because the government is making it attractive to do so. And Jews are among those people. However, Jews are also disproportionate in filing these petitions. And I have to say, I didn't expect that. I mean, I am a Jewish historian, but I didn't necessarily expect that the names that I would find so many Jewish names. I found pages and pages of like coins and, you know, Greenbergs. I mean, truly pages of them between. And I'll give you some data to sort of give you some sense of this between 1917 and 1945. Jews were far disproportionate to their number in the city. During those years, the numbers of Jewish petitioners was roughly about 50 percent of the entire name change population. But the Jewish population in New York City was at its highest around 25, 30 percent. And if you're accounting for the fact that the conditions I looked at were from Manhattan, they were not from the outer boroughs. They were mostly just from Manhattan. The disparity is even greater because the Jewish population of Manhattan hovered around 14 to 17 percent in the middle of the 20th century. So Jews are well. They're at least double their their representation in the city. And they're quite honestly like three to four times more than what they actually are in the city. And moreover, no other ethnic group came close to Jews numbers in abandoning their ethnic names. So like in 1942, the total number of petitions submitted by people with Slavic, German, Italian and Greek surnames. So all of those together were half of the Jewish petitioners who were looking to erase their ethnic names. And those are the next highest, right? There's no there's no other group, right? It's just it's just the Jews, right, in terms of making these kinds of petitions that are erasing ethnic names. So why is this? So this gets us to kind of this fourth argument, which, as I kind of suggested, are going to be kind of connected together. So on the one hand, the presence of so many Jews reflects upper quality, as I've already explained, didn't actually need to file a petition to change your name. Lots of people were doing so unofficially and and and cheaply. So the decision to file an official petition signals concern that somebody is going to be looking at your name and wondering why it's different. Why do you have this this change name? Why is somebody is going to be looking at your name? And at this time in history, the people who are having their name looked at on a job application, on an application to go to college. That is primarily middle class people who have to write their names down in order to get jobs. If you were a working class person and looking for a job, say in domestic service or loading cargo, for example, those kinds of jobs or or a union job, for example, those kinds of jobs you get through word of mouth, right? You get it through, you know, a brother who had a job in the union or you might get it through an inspection of your body, right? Like so people who are looking for jobs is Longshoremen, women who are looking for jobs as domestic servants would literally stand on corners and be inspected by potential employers and be selected for the look of their body. They did not fill out application forms at this time. It was white collar workers who needed to present their names. The businessmen to attract customers, a student's need to get into professional school or college, a secretary's need to impress a potential employer. Jews were unusual among recent immigrants, recent immigrant groups, having moved in large numbers from blue collar to white collar work by the time of the Depression. They are the most recent kind of immigrant ethnic group that is most concerned about their names appearance on paper. So that gives you a sense that, you know, Jews are simply more concerned about their names because of the kinds of jobs that they're looking for. However, the fact that 50 percent of the name change petitioners were Jewish during these years also suggests that pervasive anti-Semitism was limiting Jewish opportunities for employment and it is connected to their upward mobility. As more Jews entered white collar work, they found increasing barriers to their employment. According to one 1937 report, 89 percent of large New York companies declared that they preferred Christians as employers. Employment advertisements. I can show you an image here. Employment advertisements throughout the 1930s, increasingly noted that their employers were Christian and Jackson or Christian firms. And you can see in this image, if you look through, statisticians need to be Protestants, guards need to be Christian. Even the bank tellers need to be Christian. If you if you look, the term American is also kind of a code for Jews, as well, or, you know, sort of no visibly ethnic people. But it's definitely a code word for, you know, not Jews. And employers routinely used names as markers to identify and exclude Jews. So journalists in the 1930s, for example, reported that employment agencies and employers regularly turned away individuals with Jewish sounding names. So names are clearly Jews are being watched for, looked for. They are trying to exclude them and they're looking for them on applications. In higher education, excuse me, in higher education, inspired by Harvard's public consideration of quotas for Jewish students and from 1922 to 1923, colleges and universities throughout the country, especially in the Northeast, began limiting the numbers of Jews they accepted during these years. And they, you know, very explicitly and very carefully actually pioneered the modern application form in order to be able to determine who the Jews were in order to be able to exclude them. So I've used here John F. Kennedy's application to Harvard, in part, because actually admissions departments usually don't make these materials public. You can't find usually the admissions, the application forms, I think in part because of the kind of discriminatory nature of them, it was quite clear that they were developing these forms in order to be able to discriminate. And if you look at the questions that are asked here, I'm not sure whether you can see them. Hopefully you can see it on your screen, you know, before this era in the 1910, when you when you would apply to say Columbia or Harvard, you would get like a half page questions, like, you know, where do you live? What's your name? What scores did you get on the region's exam? Great, that's it. They began to create these long, long forms with questions like when and where was your father born? If your father was not born in America, has he been naturalized? What's his occupation? What's your mother's made name in fall, right? These are all questions and this one is is clearly a question designed to see if you've changed your name or if someone in your family changed their name, right? These are and there are pages of these kinds of questions that are all designed to kind of weed out the Jews to determine and decide who are the Jews and to limit them. This looks normal to us now because it has because it became normal, but it actually was is completely an instrument of anti-Semitism as these colleges began to decide that they had a Jewish problem because so many Jews were attempting to use college as a means of. And petitions saw petition after petition in the New York City Civil Court kind of they at these this anti-Semitism in employment and education. They don't come right out and say it, but they clearly, for example, describe troubles that they had securing work, right? So in 1937, Dora Sariecki, who is a stenographer and a typist, testified that my name proved to be a great handicap in securing a position and she actually goes for the the ellipses there are to go through all the places where she tried to get a job and couldn't get a job. And then she says in order to facilitate hearing work, I assume the name Dora Swanson. Bertram Levy, who is a president of the MailChute Corporation in 1932, sought to told the court that his name has been a hindrance to him in his efforts to gain an entrance to various firms and to secure business from them. So he sought permission from the court to adopt what he calls an American name Bertram Leslie. So you can see, I mean, for the most part, most of these petitioners, they have Jewish sounding names clearly, particularly Levy, but they are not saying at all that they are experiencing racism. Instead, what they say is that they can't get jobs, they can't get work, they can't get into schools, that they are telling us about the difficulties that they're having, but they're not comfortable saying that it's anti-Semitism. Interesting, there are petitions who speak about anti-Semitism that are written by non-Jews. So in an engineer named Julius Commins in 1932 petitioned the court to allow him to change his name to George Joseph Caley, because he said, although he was a Hungarian Roman Catholic, the employers consistently assumed that he was a Jew, making it hard for him to keep a job. Well, the highest of respect for people of the Jewish race, he finds that other people in the city of New York have not that respect and that a good many employers under whom he has worked have discriminated against the Jewish race. Another Roman Catholic named Leo Goldcock in 1937, claimed that his friends and family members had urged him to file a petition to change his name to Leo Dawson because of his difficulties finding jobs. I have had many opportunities of obtaining employment in organizations where Christians were preferred, but my name precluded favorable consideration of my application. Upon occasion, friends of mine declined to give me a written recommendation solely on the ground that my name would make it impossible to obtain a position in question. Comminskis and Goldcobs petitions shatter their ironic, but they shed a really powerful light on the anti-Semitism that shattered so many Jews efforts to find jobs and integrate into the workforce and academia at this time. It's worth noting that anti-Semitism, that that a lot of the people that we talked that I that I read, they're using kind of like vague language, right? Employers found my name difficult to pronounce and spell and remember even when the name is is pronounced and spelled phonetically, you know? So like Rose Linford, Rose Lefkowitz changed her name to Rose Linford. Some of them called their names Far and Sounding or asked for permission to use an American name, right? And this is, you know, this is something that I feel pretty strongly about 75 percent of these people were born in America, right? So their names are American, right? Like that's an American, what's an American name? It's a name of someone who's an American. So many of these people use these kinds of fumisms, like their names are foreign or difficult to pronounce. I think, in fact, maybe because they were ashamed or they felt uncomfortable. People didn't talk about anti-Semitism, particularly in these kinds of not Jewish settings. And it's Catholic men, right? Who feel more comfortable detailing the discrimination that they've that they've experienced. So I think that the differences in language there are are really interesting. So this is all I've mostly been talking with you about sort of the rise of this during the 19 teens, 1920s, 1930s, right? Beginning with World War One, where you see the numbers go up doubly. World War Two intensified tremendously the trend of name changing that had begun to go up during and after World War One. So you can see here's a nice bar graph and you can see that the numbers double in 1917, right? And stay very consistently, you know, in the 200s, 300s. But then you can see with World War Two, the dramatic skyrocketing of name changing during the war. Name changing reached its peak in 1947 with one thousand one hundred and twenty seven name change petitions submitted. That is the highest in the entire century. Four times the average of the previous decade. So why did Jewish name changing rise so exponentially during World War Two? Let's see. So. Sorry, I just want to make sure I'm not going over time. So. The growth of the government during World War Two correlated with. I apologize, I'm sorry. I want to make sure I don't go over and I apologize. I'm getting a little bit caught up, so I'm sorry about that. So the growth of the government during World War Two correlated with a rise in government concern over individuals' names. Ordinary individuals increasingly found it necessary or desirable to change their names officially in order to apply for officer training or to find a job in the defense industry. And in a lot of my petitions, you can see the impact of like the government of the states scrutinizing individual decisions to change their names. Men and women consistently reported that they wanted to change their names officially because they had inconsistent names on a variety of official documents and they wanted court approval to kind of ease their way through the government bureaucracy and make sure there were no government questions about their identity, which could sometimes be kind of questions that they worried might be kind of problematic. So, for example, in 1942, Saul Jack Kauffman, in a petition to change his name to Jack Kay, wrote, in view of the fact that I intend to register on February 16th, 1942, for selective service, I do not wish there to be any confusion with respect to my identity. And that was a name he'd been using for over 20 years already. A good number of individuals actually reported being specifically counseled by senior military officers or by government bureaucrats to change their names officially to avoid trouble. Some people thought maybe that was because they were Jewish, but it was also just that they had different names. And it wasn't just male soldiers. So women, too, who were working in the defense industry requested the same kinds of name changes. So she asked, there we go. She says, Petitioner has been known by the name proposed for the past seven years, both socially and with her employers. Petitioner is about to apply for employment by the United States government and said application has to be accompanied by a birth certificate. So, and this was sort of a part of the war, part of kind of cracking down, scrutinizing, you know, identities as a part of sort of security, but it also wound up tightening things up and wound up sort of falling upon ordinary Jews who had been using their names to be able to get jobs. And all of a sudden, they had to change their names officially in order to be able to do anything for the war effort. So the growth of bureaucracy helps to explain the increased name changes during this era. But that's not the whole story. Bureaucracy is not the whole story. The large numbers of Jews applying to change their names also suggest that forces of nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism were also at work during World War II. So this might be surprising to anyone who's seen a World War II movie. So the US government during the war, you know, put out movies like Baton, you know, where they had, you know, platoons with varied ethnic backgrounds, you know, sort of an integrated troop, not always true. There were not black men in white troops at this moment, but they always had, they used names to be able to show the kind of the democratic diversity and tolerance of the US. This was actually required by the Office of War Information and they always had a Jewish name, right? So there's a lot of kind of propaganda that even today, a lot of people believe about the war, right? That the war is, you know, kind of a place where people, you know, learn to be tolerant and that there was diversity in these troops and that that created kind of tolerance and showed American democracy. Ironically, however, it's worth noting that there actually was diverse names also symbolized intolerance in America. Poems and songs and slurs that were repeated constantly in the 1940s in US military forces and in civilian milieus and they all relied on Jewish names for their humor. They labeled Jewish people with Jewish names as cowardly, greedy, calculating in their willingness to escape military service and sometimes their desire to control the country. So if you'd walked into a subway or you picked up a military newsletter actually at this time you might have seen or opened up a letter from your loved one who was serving overseas, you might have seen this poem, The First American. Kelton Pearl Harbor, John J. Hennessey and I apologize for the racism of this, the first pilot to sink a jack ship, Colin P. Kelly, it's obviously from this era. First American to sink Japanese ship with a torpedo, John P. Buckley, greatest American air hero, Butch O'Hara, first American killed a quadruped canal, John J. O'Brien, first American to get four new tires Abraham Lipschitz. And frequently when I give this talk in person there's always like a little bit of nervous laughter because it's funny, right? But it's funny, it's funny because it is insulting and harming the Jewish name, right? And imputing cowardice and greed and profiteering to a Jew. The names in this poem, which was not really a poem, right? It's like a, you know, it's an anti-Semitic mind, but the names might change, but the first names of the heroes are always Irish or German or Anglo, and the last name was always a Jew. The last person getting four new tires was always a Jew. And oral histories and memoirs and literature of soldiers during World War II emphasize that Jewish names were used as a source of discrimination. Jewish soldiers talked about the fact that they encountered army officers who have been so ignorant as to make derisive marks about the Jewish sounding name. No matter what the name, if it's max of Jewishness, then it's funny. And Jewish petitioners talked about this in very veiled terms. So Solomon Goldfarb in 1942 says, I desire that any offspring of my marriage shall not labor under the handicap of going through life with a name such as Goldfarb. This is an uncomfortable, this is an unfortunate situation of the world we live in, but it is a situation not of my making. And I feel that we must face reality. Eugene Martin Greenberg asked to change his name to Grant, saying, while with US military forces, his career will be more successful and he may ultimately secure married advancement on a legal assumption of said proposed surname because there was a strong belief that Jews could not advance in the military because of their Jewish names. So I wanna be able to conclude, I know we're getting close. I do wanna kind of note that a lot of people sort of see World War II as having been an integrating force, a force of democracy and tolerance and diversity. Some historians have argued that because Jews were working together with non-Jews in troops, that led non-Jews to shed any kinds of prejudices and to allow them to see one another as comrades and brothers. But I think that a look at name changing in World War II complicates this. Government propaganda encouraged white soldiers to see soldiers of different backgrounds as equals, but the fact that large numbers of Jewish men and women at this time faced anti-Semitism within the military, perceived it from their officers, perceived it from the system, saw it in newsletters. They saw it and some chose to escape it by changing their names and erasing their Jewish identities from public view, which I think suggests that it was not so easy for Jewish soldiers simply to be understood as equal. In the year 1946, 40% of the people who changed their name were veterans and their wives. So it's an extraordinary number of people who went to World War II and saw Jewish names being casually targeted as humorous, open to ridicule, and even subject to discrimination, led Jews to become very sensitive to their Jewish names and led some to hide those badges of Jewishness entirely. So I would kind of argue that Jews integrated into white American military forces as a result of a kind of coerced conformity rather than a kind of democratic inclusion that I think we sometimes imagine and that these World War II movies kind of propose for us. So let me leave you with some conclusions so we have time to talk because I don't wanna take up too much time. I'd like to sort of see that name changing reflected Jewish upward mobility. I mean, there's some happy news to this, right? In some ways, right? Jews are actually successful in white collar work and they're changing their names, you know, that is reflecting that they are having some success in white collar work and they want to go further. They have some economic success. They can spend their economic success changing their names. But it also reflected rising anti-Semitism during the same era. And rather than alleviating anti-Semitism in the US as some people might imagine, instead, World War II probably did intensify it. And so that's my kids saying thank you for coming. And sorry for the rush at the end. I apologize for that. I just wanted to make sure we had enough time to answer questions. So please, let me know what you have to say. Thanks so much for your time and attention. Back on. Thank you so much, Kirsten. Really enjoyable talk. And we have so many wonderful questions. So I have some questions that I wanna ask you, but I think before I ask you some of my questions, a number of people have asked. So I think we have to start with this. They'd like you to tell us about your last name. Some people also wanna know more about your first name. One person just came out and asked, are you Jewish? So maybe you could just start with your name. Sure. Yes, I am Jewish. And my name, the last name for Maglush was changed. We don't know when it was changed, but when my mother finally decided to kind of put in a V and an O with an umlaut, she was able to find vermuglush instead of vermuglush. So we don't know at what point it changed. And there are some people in the family who did actually shorten it further to firm. But in general, if you know anybody with a name for Maglush, they're related to me. There are no other vermuglushes in the world other than my relatives. So I believe it's Yiddish, I actually don't speak Yiddish. So but my understanding is that vermuglush is money or possible money. And so it is kind of a Jewish name. My name Kirsten is a name that came because my parents were sixties folks and they wanted me to have, I was named actually after the alcoholic in the days of wine and roses. If you really want to know, my parents just thought it was a pretty name and they didn't want to be kind of held down to sort of organized religion. And they just gave me, they thought I needed a foreign sounding name. And so I got one. So I had never thought about my name so much until I started doing this work. And I've always liked my name. It's actually, it's a little weird to have to answer to it in public forums, but it certainly has made me think about name changing and decide ultimately that I didn't want to change my name. I'm very proud of it. All names have stories and because it's my name, it's now a Jewish name. I wanna ask you one more question. The first question that we got, maybe three minutes after you started speaking, Sue Fern wrote, my husband Mattis Fern was born Mattis from Agliff. I believe we're cousins. He's the cousins, yeah, of the late Max Fern. Why did your family not change their names? So are you Sue Fern's cousin? I don't know all my cousins, but I do know, is it, are you saying Fern or Fern with an M or an N? It's with an N is a Nancy, but it's her husband. Her husband was born Mattis from Agliff. Yeah, so I didn't know anybody had changed their name to F-E-R-N with like as a Nancy. I knew that there were people who changed their name to Firm, F-E-R-N. And I know Mattis absolutely, like that's definitely the name in my family. So yes, we're related, but I didn't know and actually I need to talk to my mother about that because I didn't know somebody had changed their name to an N, F-E-R-N. I knew about firms, I knew. She writes that her husband is first cousins with the late Max Fern with an M. Yes, and those are the folks we know that my parents are, yeah, we're in touch with that part of the family. Yes, so yes, there you go. This is Jewish genealogy. Absolutely, let me just say a few words. You have really a lot of great questions. So I'm gonna try to get to the question as soon as I can, but I wanted to ask you, were you personally surprised by what your study revealed? That is, did you begin research on this book with the assumption that Jews who changed their names did so to assimilate? Or did you suspect that most Jews who changed their names did so in response to anti-Semitism and the desire to get better jobs, educational opportunities and so on? You know what, I'm embarrassed to say that I don't think, usually as an historian, like you go in and you've read some of the secondary literature. So you've read what other historians have said about the subject. So you come in kind of predisposed to think something, say something. And I have to say that there was very little literature. There was virtually nothing. There was very little that any historians had written. And I have to say that I didn't really think about it. I mean, this is kind of an embarrassing thing to admit. I thought it was just a fascinating subject. And I wasn't sure what I would find. I didn't think I would find so many Jews by no means. I thought it would be a larger process of seeing lots of different people change their names. I was actually kind of excited about that because I actually trained as an American historian, not as a Jewish historian. And I was actually looking forward to working with lots of different groups, not just Jews. I actually thought that what I would find, I thought maybe I'd find, you know, I was pretty sure I'd find Jews. But I didn't, I actually thought it was gonna be a broader study of immigrants changing their names. I actually did not anticipate that this would be a story. And in fact, I had to have like friends point out to me that this was such a story of anti-Semitism because it was not, I did not expect it. And I didn't expect it to be such a Jewish story. I really didn't. So maybe that was my own foolishness. But it was also, there was not anything in the literature. And I think I went in with a lot of these stereotypes that it was, you know, that immigrants changed their names, you know, to become American, right? That that's, that that was kind of the nature of what it, what name changing was. Yeah, yeah, that was what I went in thinking. So, and yeah, it was kind of, it was definitely not what I anticipated. I did not think I was gonna be writing by anti-Semitism at all. Yeah, I mean, it's just interesting with that as I was reading your book, I thought if you were my age, you know, I'm about 20 years older than you are, I think you would have begun assuming that it was because of anti-Semitism. And, you know, because I guess I was born closer to the explosion of name changing. And you were born after, I don't know. It was just sort of when I started reading your book, I thought I could think of so many people that I know and relatives of mine and friends of my family. And it was just so common. And I am from New York. It was just so common for Jews to change their names. But all, you know, as you write in the book, to get better in Jews who are already solidly middle class or upper middle class. So I just, I mean, your study really is fascinating. You know, you write in your book, Kirsten, that one reason why you had to stand online at the beginning in the New York civil courts is because this material wasn't digitized. And somebody wrote in and asked whether it has since been digitized. Are they digitized today? I don't believe so. I mean, I haven't gone back and checked, but I do not think that they are. I mean, they did not have the money for it as far as I know. So, you know, it was a fascinating story. I mean, I can certainly give you more stories about my experiences, which are very unusual for historians' experiences. I was literally standing with and it helped to shape my work, actually. I mean, I was in the office every day with, you know, civil servants and then people changing their names. You know, I was standing online next to them. They, I'm sorry, the person, the civil servant, the one of the people working at the court told me that he had tried to put in a money for a grant to try to get these materials digitized. I believe what's digitized now for the more recent stuff is the indexing. So if you've changed your name more recently, so when I went up through 2012, the last, I think, the beginning in 2007 or 2002, you can see and you can access through a index, you know, the names that are changed, but not the petitions. And for me, I had to use indexes. I mean, I was using indexes that were all hard copy. I don't believe any of it. I mean, this is boxes and boxes. I mean, it's like, I compare it to the room when they first showed it to me. I compare it to like the room in the, at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know, where they go in and there's just this huge room with just boxes and boxes like stacked up to the top. That's what it was like. I mean, it was just boxes and boxes. It would be a lot of money and I just don't think that New York City Civil Court, it's not their interest. So yeah, so as far as I know, no. Let me ask you one more question and we'll open it up. I have to say, I was fascinated by the importance of race in your study, especially given the fact that Jews are not a race, but you discussed in the book, moving even beyond the period of time that you talked about tonight, how the fact that middle and upper middle class Jews in mid-century could use name-changing as a means of being accepted as whites in elite American social circles and how that really differentiates Jewish name-changing from that of other racial groups. And I'm wondering if you could, there were a few questions that people have asked about this. Jews were not the only group of people who changed their names, but you argue in the book that in some ways, Jewish name-changing was unique. Can you talk a little more about that? Sure, well, so it's a difference in timeframe. So in the beginning, so from the 1887 period through say the six, I mean, Jews are really disproportionate all the way through the 60s. I mean, they are disproportionate during all that period of time. They're disproportionate to other ethnic groups changing their names and they're also disproportionate for their existence in the city, they just are. So I did look at other groups. It was primarily kind of white ethnic groups, very few people of color in those early years. So it's overwhelmingly mostly white ethnic groups. And this is, of course, Jews are not only white, right? Jews can be lots of colors, but at this moment they're mostly Ashkenazic Jewish names. And there are very few to know Black name-change petitioners during those early years. So I compare in the early years, I mean, I compare Jews, for example, to Italians. So Italians are the group that's probably like has, and it switches over time, different years, different other ethnic groups kind of emerge, but Italians are changing their names roughly equivalent to their existence in the city, right? If they're about 10% of the city, they're about 10% of the petitioners. So Jews are just so far out of whack in comparison to how many of them live there and they're far out of whack compared to all the other ethnic groups. My work though, I do go all the way to 2012 and my final chapter does look at, now Jews are not of all disproportionate, right? That changes by the 1980s really. And then there's a new explosion of name-changing after 9-11. And what we do see now is that it is primarily working class people of color and women who are the people who are mostly changing their names. And they're doing so in really, really different ways. They are mostly, yes, because of race, they don't have kind of a liminal, they don't have kind of an identity that would make a name change allow them to get a better job, right? They are marked by their physical characteristics, racially as different. And so a name change for them is not necessarily gonna be getting them middle-class jobs. And so they're mostly changing their names for family reasons. They're changing their names because a husband left or they're changing names because somebody died or they're divorced or those kinds of things or they're having trouble with security that they're not changing their names for these kinds of upper middle-class reasons. I don't know, I could go on, but I don't wanna take them too much time. But yeah, I mean, race absolutely plays a role. The fact that Ashkenazic Jews pretty much look white means that they can do this, but of course their names are being used to turn them into a race, right? So that the purpose of these application forms is literally to take people who sort of maybe look like they're white and be able to give them a marker that then makes them a different race, right? So if they then have the name Levy, they've become that race, right? And that's kind of one of the central thing, story is I think of the book. Right, and that leads to the whole historical connection between name changing and passing. And, you know, if we had more time, we could talk a lot more about that. I have to say by the time I got to that section in your book, I was really thinking of Philip Roth and his book, The Human Stain, which is about both names and passing, right? I mean, the story of a light-skinned black former professor at a college who amazingly decides that he's gonna change his identity being Jewish during World War II. And his name, I mean, I think it's significant that his name Coleman Silk might be a Jewish name. It's not an identifiably black name, but again, the whole focus of the book is on passing. And I just, I know you're interested in the whole topic of passing as well. And again, a topic for another time, but let's get back to that. I would love it. I really have a ton of questions here. All right, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna, let me see. Well, one person asked, would you say that name changing is a major obstacle when tracing one's Jewish roots? You know, so I am not a genealogist. My mother does more of the genealogy in the family. She's the one who figured out that we were from Oblash. So I am actually, I know mostly from what I hear from her and other, I mean, I've given talks to lots of genealogical groups and that is my, that's my understanding, right? I mean, I know my mother worked for years and was like, ah, we can't find our family. And then, you know, she figured out this name change and was able to make a lot of connections. And I certainly do understand that that's, I mean, I do, I talk to a lot of genealogy groups and I think people are really, really interested in that because it does, it does produce an obstacle, absolutely. I haven't experienced it personally, but as I say, certainly it's an issue in my family and what I hear from a lot of people. Yeah, I would say my sister Amy and I have been on ancestry DNA for the last few years and it is really amazing how many people, because ancestry DNA have connected us to each other, even though most of the people who've written to us are no longer Umanski, that's one way to easily find people who are related to, despite their name. And when I used to have more time to do some genealogical research in my family, ships manifests are enormously helpful because as you talked about this evening, you know, that was the name that they had when they left Europe. And so if you have any idea or any sort of variation on your name, it's that that stuff is digitized and it's pretty easy to find and census records. You can find all of this free. So all right, let's go on here. We hear the most and a few people asked a variation of this question. We hear the most about name changing at Ellis Island. Did name changing also occur at the Canadian border for people that entered there from Europe? Well, so I would say in general that the name changing is not at Ellis Island. And so I assume that Canadian border that it's also that they're using a similar process and that they're not actually changing names. But I am embarrassed to say that I did not look at Canadian name changing in much depth at all. I do look at a family that had its roots in Toronto but I apologize that I just don't know enough about Canadian Jewish history to be able to answer. And I didn't look at Canadian name changing. So I apologize that I don't know the answer to that question. And I'll say I don't know whether people ask about other things, there are comparisons for certain to other Jewish, so Israel and England, people have asked me from time to time whether the story of American name changing is unique or how much it's similar to other places. And I would say that I'm always struck by sort of similarities between the US and Israel in terms of the fact that in both of them Eastern European Jewish names were seen as very low class and things that people wanted to change and that the government in varying levels was kind of encouraging that Jews do change away from kind of osteodon names, Eastern European Jewish names. So I think those are really interesting similarities. And I do think you certainly, I mean, if you look at English Jewish history does feature a lot of name changing in this way. I think that the United States has a lot more openness to name changing than probably anywhere else in the world. The US has used name changing as kind of a way of integrating people and really encouraging it in a way that I think is fairly unique throughout the world. And related to that, and some people are asking variations of this question as well, is the fact that people are asking whether the first Jewish family member to come over to America, did they first change their name? And then other people change their name as well. In your book though, you talk about how couples change their names together. Yeah, so this is really interesting. I mean, I didn't, I took this out of the paper frequently this talk, I include this argument, but because we wanted to keep it shorter and have more time for conversation, I took out this argument. One of the other things that really surprised me actually, which I should have, I realized made clear is that what I also, what was fascinating, I made this point about it being individual, all these images are individuals, but actually these petitions have two, three, four, six people on them. People are changing their name together as families, very much so, it is a family family process. And that doesn't always mean that extended family, so it doesn't mean that if you had your brother came in in 1892 and then you come in in 1907 and their family has changed their name, it doesn't mean that you coming in are necessarily gonna take that new name. As you can see, I'm from English and there's firms, right? So not every branch of the family necessarily changes, but within immediate families and even like brothers, adult brothers and siblings, you see them changing their names together a lot. And I think in part that is because of issues of kind of, this is about middle-class mobility and there's a certain shame to having a different name, right? There's suspicion and questions and some of the petitions talk about that, that there's embarrassment and suspicion about like, how can you be a family member if you have a different name? And so I think that there was a certain desire for as many family members as you knew that how people might find you, right? That you all kind of change your name together so that you could kind of preserve the veneer of this kind of middle-class perspective with this new name. Right, so therefore, are you saying that you see this more in Jewish name changing than a name changing among other ethnic groups? No, so no, so it's also cheaper to change your name as a family. So Italians and Greeks and Slavs, and there's very few Greeks, but Italians and Slavs, they change their names as in family units too. They just don't do so in large numbers. They just, they're not, they're doing it representative to their population. But no, but because our image of name changing is so individual, I think it is important to sort of note that it really wasn't an individual decision. It was a family decision, like by this moment and especially for Jews, I think because they are all facing antisemitism, right? So a wife might be working as a stenographer or they might be worrying about their kids who they want to get into a school, right? So they're all gonna change their family and their name in that way, which I think is gonna be kind of more of a propulsion for more of the families to change their names than you might have for an Italian family, for example, where women are not working, right? And they may not be getting middle-class jobs where they're necessarily concerned that their son or their daughter can't get in, can't get employed by this employer or can't get into the school, right? It's not forming that family's concern in the same way. So in other words, you paid per petition? Yep. Not by how many people were on the petition? Right, so I think probably, right, exactly. So I found petitions, most of the petitions, I don't know if I have the numbers of my fingertips, but most of the petitions were multi, had more than one person on the petition. They were, you at least had a couple and brothers changed together, entire family units. I mean, I think the largest I found was eight or nine because you'd have the parents and then you'd have adult siblings and then you'd have the adult siblings, spouses, you just had large numbers of people on these petitions. Some of them, and then some of them would be one, but the majority of them had at least two or three. I mean, it was very much a family activity. One person asked, would an employee be fired if the employer found out post hire that the employee was Jewish but used a legally anglicized name on the paperwork? I, my sources just don't give me information about that. I don't have any information about that. I do, so I did have a couple of sources that don't really speak to that. And that's an interesting question. Nobody's, I don't think anybody's asked me that. I do have sources of people saying that they changed their names. They're not very many people who wanted to change their names back, but I do have a couple of petitions from people who wanted to change their names back and they do describe, you know, that, you know, if they're dealing with other Jews, the Jews made fun of them or didn't want to hire them or, you know, so nobody got fired, but, and it's not like sort of like non-Jews looking down at me like, oh, you defrauded me or anything like that. I just haven't heard anything like that. But I did find that with people changing their names back that once they had changed their names that Jewish employers or Jewish clients were not happy with that. They did not like that name change. So they didn't feel defrauded. They just were like, you're betraying our community. You know, we don't, you know, they would make fun of them. One person changed his name back because he wanted to marry an Orthodox Jewish woman and her family wouldn't let the marriage take place because he had changed his name. What decade was that in? 30s, 40s, all of these are from the... It's not only in the century. They're all from the 30s and 40s. Yeah, I mean, you know, the stuff I'm talking about and kind of the bulk of it is at this moment. All right. Did someone is asking, did the court ever refuse petitioners request to change names? So I don't have evidence of that from the petitions but there are court orders that I have been able to find through some other like old articles. So there were very few. I actually, I took it out of the story which is kind of surprising. I sometimes have it here. There are a few great examples of Jewish judges who turned back Jewish petitions with very funny language. I don't know where I took. I used to have it. I took it out of this one probably for time issues where they would, you know, there was an example of a judge Levy turning down, excuse me, he accepted the request of someone named Levy trying to change his name to something else. But he said, you know, my success proves you could be successful. You know, let this man change his name so his people can be done with him. You know, and we want no more of him. You know, it was one of those kind of things. So, you know, there were a few of those. And then most concerning, and I didn't, I have found this written about in a secondary source in a historical text. There was one judge during World War II who turned down a number of name changes saying that the government has in a time of war, the government has an interest in knowing the ethnic or the national background of its citizens. That is, that's it. That's all I've got. In general, everything I see is that thousands of people, all of my things, they're almost all accepted. So I think there's a few instances of judges kind of being either upset or anti-Semitic. But the general thrust is that this was a welcome move. This was not something that the government was looking to discourage. In fact, it encouraged it. But someone else asks, have you found any evidence that the Shoah had any influence on the high rate of Jewish name changes? It's a good question. No, I mean, not in general. I think that you could, you can read into some of the language. I think in the 30s and 40s, you can see some of the language like I read of Solomon Goldfarb saying, my name is an impediment. I can't remember a handicap. Using terms like this that I think maybe sort of reflect a certain fear of anti-Semitism and a sense of kind of the growing conflict. There's one, there's a few petitions that are very poignant, but nothing is clearly spoken. And then after the war, I do have a few examples of some survivors changing their names. My sense is that because you could also change your name with naturalization petitions, that probably a lot more survivors, if they did change their names, change their names using naturalization petitions than they did with my petitions. But I did find a few, actually the example that I just gave you of people changing their name and then changing them back, one of them was a survivor of the Shoah actually who, I think they were refugees before the war actually, but I think they changed their name after the war. They came to the US like in the late 30s and they thought they needed to change their names to get jobs, but then they knew they had all these Jewish networks and survivor networks and people who kind of looked down on them and they said that people who've been clients of theirs before the war, before this now didn't wanna work with them because they changed their names, so they changed their names back. So that was someone who was a refugee. So there's some, but not as much as I would have thought and you heard from my biography that my last book was on Holocaust memory. So I think I might, maybe if I understand your question and I think I might have imagined that there would have been more, it doesn't come through clearly, it comes through in shadows and kind of vacants, I think. One question from Neil Ginsburg, during and after World War II, were there many examples of people with Jewish names who were promoted within the military or flourished in the US after the war? Right after the war or I guess I can't, so I'll just have to run with it. I'll try to guess what you're asking Neil Ginsburg, I'm sorry. I don't, that's a really interesting question that no one has asked me. I did not follow that line of question. Like I didn't think to like do that kind of research. I imagine there are ways that you could probably do it. I'm not an economist, I'm not generally a big numbers person. It was actually, this was a major switch for me to kind of do the, cause I did a lot of kind of numeric work with this that I don't usually do. I'm sure there are ways of kind of tracking that if you had kind of particular categories you were looking in, I didn't do that kind of looking. My sense is that people with those kinds of names probably didn't become as successful until the 60s. When there are still disproportionate name changes among Jews, but I think there's more comfort with those kind of Jewish sounding names as there's kind of a cultural change by the 1960s, but I didn't look at this systematically. So I can't answer you as well as I could, but that isn't interesting. There's probably ways you could track that. That's interesting. We use a question from an anonymous attendee that really isn't directly related to your research, but I'm gonna ask you anyway. She writes or he writes, I've been called to pushy being too Jewish that I wear my Jewishness on my sleeve told to hide my Jewishness in order to protect my safety and my life. Do you have a strategy of how to achieve inclusion and being warmly welcomed rather than ignored overlooked or eradicated and left out? Oh my goodness. Don't ask historians for strategies. We can only tell you about what happened in the past not what you should do in the future. I mean, I don't know whether this question is kind of asking whether this is a problematic strategy that I'm describing, right? That's the sense that I'm gonna take this question and that I'm describing this as a strategy that people used when they were faced with great pressure, a lot of pressure economically, as well as socially and personally, right? And I think the way I'm gonna read this question is that you're asking me whether this is a good strategy and whether maybe there's problems with the strategy. And I think that and whether maybe now we might encourage people to develop some other kind of strategy that would not involve a family name, erasing a connection to your community and your... And yeah, I mean, I think there were problems with the strategy. I didn't, the middle part of my book, which I didn't wind up talking about now and I talked about this right before the talk, the middle part of my book talks about a lot of unease within the Jewish community about this strategy after the war. It doesn't really emerge before the war. And I think it doesn't emerge before the war because people are so overwhelmed by anti-Semitism and they're so scared that they don't know how to react, but there's not a lot of attacks on people who change their names before the war. They see it as assimilation, people are facing anti-Semitism, they don't do very much. After the war in the 40s and 50s, there is much more kind of internal debates within the Jewish community and a lot more attacks on people who've changed their names as betraying the community, self-hating Jews, being people who are self-hating Jews. And I don't like that necessarily. Like I don't like the idea of attacking people who felt themselves under stress and chose the best they could do. So I don't necessarily like that, but people who changed their names, like they did face, like they kept secrets from their children, their children were pained. Grandchildren were pained decades later to learn of this. I think that just anytime you need to cut off a piece of yourself to one portion of the world, no, I don't think that's not a strategy I would want. I don't know that I can say what strategy. I mean, I think being able to keep the name Kirsten from Aguilish or whatever is your name is clearly a better strategy, to be able to sort of fight for diversity and inclusion in a way that I hope that we try to now in university campuses and I think is much better. So yeah, I would not promote this as a good strategy. I'm more describing it and the context, the situation where people felt themselves in so we don't attack them or ignore them, but sort of recognize what they were facing and acknowledge that this is what they were facing and that this was the strategy that worked at the time. Oh, Gary Bycough writes, my close friend in Jackson Heights was Jackie from Aguilish. My entire family is here. I know it too. And we have a lot more questions that are here that we won't get you, but if I find any others that... Oh, wait, I love Jackie, I love Jackie. I haven't seen him in ages and ages. He, I know him, his name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Jackie from Aguilish. I know, but he tastes a different though. And Gary asks, what happened to Jackie? I haven't talked to them. I haven't seen him in ages. I'm sorry. I exclaim my mother's not on this call. She would be laughing right now. I haven't talked to Jackie in a long time, but we were close when we were young. He's older than I am, but I definitely saw him at family stuff and I'd love to hang out with him. So, oh, I'm not talking about Jackie in a while. Well, this is the advantage of having an unusual name. I always see multiple emails every month from people who ask me if I'm related to a certain Umanski. And, you know, whereas if we have more usual names, or, you know, we probably wouldn't get as many... We wouldn't get no, right? Exactly, do you know that, Cohen? No. Let me see, if we have time, maybe if you want more, we really have to go. So, you really, we have so many, we have, we had almost 70 questions for this talk, but I have to say a few people have written and asked me, they said, if I heard you correctly, one person says, you said Jews are not a race. Jews are not a race. Jews are, there are white Jews, there are black Jews, they're Asian Jews, Jews are not a race. In the late 19th century, right-wing politicians and fascists labeled Jews a race, but Jews are not a race. And they are people, we're an ethnic group, for many Jews, Jews are also a nation, but Jews are not a race. Kirsten, you have anything you wanna say on that? Well, I would say, race is always a construction, right? Race doesn't have any real meaning, right? So, none of it is real, right? But the effects are real, and Jews have obviously been treated as a race since the 19th century, and that has real consequences and real impacts. So, that kind of racial thinking from others winds up shaping the group that is treated. And so that historical legacy, I think, so it's all a construction, none of it is real, right? But then the effects of it have real impact on people's lives, is what I would say. Really, and that's where P. Goldberg went wrong. Exactly, I remember P. Goldberg. I mean, she was wrong, Jews have been perceived as a race. Exactly. Exactly. In World War II, during the Holocaust, I mean, Jews were put to death not because of who they were, but because of who their grandparents were. And it really had nothing to do with their religious identity. It really did have to do with some fantasized racial identification of Jews. Well, unfortunately, out of time, there's so much more that I could ask you, and there's so much more we could discuss. I really wanna thank you so much, Kristen, for being with us this evening. I wanna thank everyone in the audience who is here as well, and our virtual audience, just to give a plug for the next Bennett Center lecture, which we have a few weeks, I think, until we get to this Monday, March 7th, which I guess I think it's a week and a half from now. I'm not really sure, but we have the annual Adolf and Ruth Schermacher lecture in Judaic Studies. Our speaker this year is Carol Myers, who is the Mary Grace Wilson Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Duke University. Dr. Myers is a biblical scholar, a field archeologist, and author of Discovering Eve, Ancient Israelite Women in Context. And she's giving a talk called the Ancient Gender Gap, the Bible Archeology in Israelite Women. I know Dr. Myers, it's gonna be a fascinating talk, and if you're interested in attending this talk, you just have to register at fairfield.edu, backslash Bennett programs. Christian from English, thank you so much. I look forward to the time when we can see one another in person. Again, everyone, thanks for being with us, and stay safe. Yeah, and thank you all so much. It was just wonderful. And if you have any follow-up questions, you can feel free to look for my email online, and I'm happy to answer any questions. So, great. Bye, thank you so much for the invitation. Thank you to everyone. Have a good night. Thanks, bye. Bye.