Monthly Programs

A presentation by Susan Breitzer

The 1924 Immigration Act severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in favor of “Old Stock” immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. It curtailed much postwar European immigration and completely excluded immigration from Asia. But the Immigration Act had an especially devastating effect on Europe's Jews, with increased restrictionism just when refuge was most neededeven before the Holocaust. This situation resulted from immigration restrictions shaped by combination of increasingly racialized antisemitism and geographical bias that disfavored the new “Eastern” countries created after World War I where many Jews lived. In addition, European Jews were ill-affected by the U.S.'s stricter enforcement of restrictions and the evisceration of previous religious persecution exemptions. This presentation will examine the devastating and eventually deadly effect of this combination of morphing antisemitism and shifting geographical boundaries on the creation and the enforcement of the 1924 Immigration act and the national origins quotas that were so central to it.

Susan Breitzer holds a Ph.D. in American Jewish history from the University of Iowa. She is an independent historian, educational content writer, and freelance book reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, and she is currently moving into academic developmental editing. She has recorded a podcast for the Organization of American Historians' “Intervals” series on the topic of religious responses to the 1918 Influenza pandemic and presented guest lectures at Duke University on the topic of “Jewish Perspectives on Faith and Feminism.” She was a contributor of one of the five interpretive essays for the “Collecting These Times” digital project on American Jewish responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.