Jewish Immigration to the United States - Essay Example

As described by Publisher (1997), "they went from Poland to polo in one generation" nearly penniless and went on to become the greatest movie moguls of all time. Traced as having started out in retail in furs and dry goods, they discovered the lucrative possibilities of movie-making. The American dream refers to the freedom to live a preferred lifestyle. However, their belief in the freedom to practice their religion was denied Pogrom, or ethnic cleansing tops the list of reasons for Jewish immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe to the United States during this period.

Non-Jewish people created havoc on the Jewish communities including the destruction of homes, businesses, and religious places with authoritative consent (Laquer, 2006). The persecution that happened to the Jews came from anti-Semitism strongly implemented by the Tsarist Empire in Hitler's period. From an organized riot to destruct Jewish communities, pogroms extended to the mass killing of the Jews. This stirred great fear among some Jews who eventually immigrated to the United States and some parts of the United Kingdom (Laquer, 2006).

The impetus for Jewish immigration different. . se of the last thirty-five years and it has gone to eight million." These Jews were blamed as responsible for Anti-Semitism whose fundamental premise is that something was basically wrong with the Jews (Sharan, 2004). The other immigrants did not particularly have this problem. The sense of abnormality and self-hatred were not imputed on the Irish, Japanese and Chinese (Lessing, 2004). The impetus for Jewish immigration was starkly different from that of the Japanese, Chinese, and Irish.

The Japanese immigrants began entering the United States in the 1880s, largely as farmers under threat of Japan's industrial and land reforms under the Meiji Restoration. They sought to be employed with the sugar plantations in Hawaii, and eventually found themselves in California (Immigration, Pacific Link, 2007). As for the Chinese immigrants, some came to the United States in relatively large groups in 1849 and 1882 between the start of the California gold rush ("Chinese Immigration," LOC, 2004).

It was business, therefore, that primarily moved them to immigrate. Lastly, a number of Irish entered the U.S. between 1820 and 1830 and skyrocketed in the 1840s to nearly 2 million in that decade. They were different from the Jewish immigrants in that the Irish immigrants' reason was to escape from starvation. According to Handlin (1972), for some years, the crops remained undependable for them and famine swept through their land. Some records, however, claim that the Irish were encouraged to emigrate because of political oppression by the British government and religious persecution of Catholic Irish ("The Irish.

Immigration, 2007). Among all of these emigrants, therefore, it was the Jews who left their lands and nation due to much persecution, particularly the pogrom.