Beck Article

This was a good article. It was well organized and left me asking question about other immigrant group’s patterns of library use. It helped that it came to the positive conclusion that libraries and education were important in the life of the group in question and even more refreshing for me was the fact that Beck showed how this enriched Russian-Jewish and didn’t some how Americanize it out of existence like Harris implies.

I wish Beck would have talked more about the position of Russian-Jews in relation to other immigrant groups because I can’t help but feel that because their culture put so much emphasis on education and therefore they sought to learn English and about American society that they (at the risk of sounding racist) were a model ethnic group in regard to library use and may have been an exception. On the other hand I may just be falling into that same trap of elitist thinking that Harris did when generalized about immigrant’s lack of desire for education.

Russian-Jewish immigrants got a lot educational opportunities from Jewish philanthropic organizations. Or at least I believe that is what the Educational Alliance and the Hebrew Free School Association were because Beck didn’t really explain how these and other groups worked. And again it makes me wonder what kind if any similar organizations existed for other immigrant groups.

Beck makes little mention of New York’s public Library system’s role in immigrant education programs but I was surprises at how early other libraries that were geared toward Jewish population received money from the city. I would like to know how long these libraries existed and at what point did the New York public library system began to focus on immigrants and/or Jewish patrons.