not a majority, are skilled workers such as bakers,
tobacco workers, carpenters, painters, and butchers. The garment trades,
to which they find themselves adapted, and for which New York is the
world center, engages perhaps 100,000 of them, men, women, and children,
many of them in the sweat-shops, which they created. For the first time
in their history, the Jews have built up a great industrial class, this
being an American development. According to a Jewish authority,[69] the
"unspeakable evils of the tenements and sweat-shops" of the ghetto are
undermining their physical and moral health.

[Sidenote: Location]

The newly arrived Russian Jew is kept in the ghetto of the larger
cities--New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston--not only by his
poverty and ignorance but by his orthodoxy. In this district the rules
of his religion can more certainly be followed. Here can be found the
lawful food, here the orthodox places of worship, here neighbors and
friends can be visited within "a sabbath day's journey." The young
people, however, rapidly shake off such trammels, and in the endeavor to
be like Americans urge their parents to move away from this "foreign"
district. When they succeed, the Americanizing process may be considered
well under way. Concerning the religious change that comes over the
young Jew after he reaches this country, a writer says:[70]

[Sidenote: Become Estranged from Judaism]

"Many a young man, who was firm in his religious convictions in his
native village, having heard of the religious laxity prevalent in
America, had fully made up his mind not to be misled by the temptation
and allurements of the free country, but he succumbed in his struggle
and renounced his Judaism when first submitting his chin to the barber's
razor, at the entreaties and persuasions of his Americanized friends
and relatives. Religion then appeared to him not only distinct from
life, but antagonistic to it, and since it was life, a free, full,
undisturbed life he sought in coming here, he felt compelled to divorce
himself from all the religious ties that had hitherto encompassed him.
Thus it is that the immigrant Jewish youth, even those faithful and
loyal to the institutions of old and who desired to conduct their lives
in accordance with the precepts of their religion, became estranged from
Judaism and suffered themselves to be swept along by the tide. Thus the
immigrant Jew in America has frequently become callous and