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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Christopher M. Sterba. Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 271. Cloth $65.00, paper $19.95.
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| This well-written book adds to the growing scholarship dealing with the effects of World War I on American society. Christopher M. Sterba looks at the Great War and two groups of "new immigrants": the Italians of New Haven, Connecticut, and the Eastern European Jewish communities of New York City. Not only were these the "largest immigrant groups in their respective cities" (p. 4), but they were also associated with two specific military units: the all-Italian machine gun company and the Seveny-seventh Division. Sterba argues that their participation in the war through military and other forms of service helped to erode the cultural and political isolation experienced by these two immigrant groups before 1917 and provided a basis for their influence in the 1930s. |
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The two very different communities were affected by the war in different ways. The Italian population in New Haven numbered 34,000 in 1920, twenty-one percent of the city's population. The 1.5 million Jews constituted almost thirty percent of New York City's inhabitants, and almost half of the total American Jewish population. Many of the latter had their origins in the German migration of the 1840s, and often differed from later Jewish immigrants in religious outlook and economic position. |
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