Pioneered by such mid-twentieth-century historians and social scientists as Rudolf Glanz, Jacob Lestchinsky, Elias Tcherikower, Oscar Handlin, and Moses Rischin, by economists Arcadius Kahan and Simon Kuznets, and memorably enshrined in the world of letters by Irving Howe, for over fifty years the reexamination of the East European Jewish migration to America has developed into a relatively well endowed field. This is only fitting, as it was the East European stream that transformed American Jewry from its once modest size of some 250,000 to the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world, over 5.5 million strong at its peak in the second half of the twentieth century. The historical significance of that transformation remains self-evident, as witness the constant output of new studies related to the subject. Yet, I am prompted to raise some critical questions about the social and historiographical contexts in which immigration history and Jewish ethnic history have been nurtured over the past generation. It is my contention that these contexts have, in the main, encouraged the emergence of what I will call "the new filiopietism"--a brand of boosterism akin to the earliest endeavors in the writing of American Jewish history more than a century ago. The following brief analysis represents the preliminary foreground of a new study of the Jewish immigrant experience that I have undertaken, to be called, "The Luftmensch and the Laborer: Work, Class and Social Capital in the Americanization of Jewish Immigrants (1881-1929)."
