On her book A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America
Cover Interview of June 12, 2019
A close-up
Page 55 contains some of the most interesting visual
evidence that my book offers, with both methodological and historical significance.
On this page, readers will find the “Distinctive Jewish Names,” or DJN list, a
list developed by an American Jewish social scientist, Samuel Calmin Kohs, to
count Jews for social welfare purposes. To create the list, Kohs asked a group
of Jews and non-Jews to identify the names that they saw as exclusively Jewish;
the agreed-upon 106 names on this list then became a part of Kohs’ counting
methodology.
I find this list compelling for many reasons. For one thing,
the names themselves—which include Goldberg, Epstein, Rosenberg—are just
fascinating to look at. Individually, many of these names have been used as
jokes or synecdoches for Jewishness. Brought together on one list, they offer a
fascinating portrait of what it means to be a Jew: how Jews are perceived and
understood through the linguistic signals of their names. One of the key points
I hope to make in my book is that Jewish names do not have inherent Jewish
meaning, but they were historically turned into racial markers of Jewish identity,
markers that identified Jews and enabled their exclusion.
In addition to illuminating how Jewish names have determined
and marked Jewish identity, the DJN list is a fascinating historical document
of its moment, the early 1940s. Although Kohs initially constructed the list to
help provide social services for Jews, he first used the list to help the
National Jewish Welfare Board count the Jews fighting in World War II, in order
to defend Jews against the claim that they evaded service. The list is thus a
testament to the antisemitism of the era, while it also clearly notes how
crucial Jewish names were for Jewish identity at this time.
Finally, the DJN list offers valuable methodological
possibilities. If name change petitioners possessed one of these names, I
counted them as Jews. (If they possessed other Jewish-sounding names, I used a
host of other clues to determine if they were Jewish). As noted before,
American Jewish historians have had difficulty studying secular Jews
unaffiliated with the Jewish community. The distinctive Jewish names list—used
judiciously, with appropriate qualifiers—can help historians to go beyond
organizational records to consider secular Jews in America.
Certainly, using the DJN list throws a harsh light on the
antisemitism that my research uncovered: using Kohs’ methodology, only about
3.75 percent of the New York population should have had a distinctive Jewish
name found on the list. Yet roughly 30 percent of petitioners for a name change
in New York City Civil Court had one of these 106 “distinctive Jewish names.” This
disproportionality points to the stigma that Jewish names possessed during the
1940s, while it also offers insight into Jewish responses to that stigma.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
A close-up
Page 55 contains some of the most interesting visual evidence that my book offers, with both methodological and historical significance. On this page, readers will find the “Distinctive Jewish Names,” or DJN list, a list developed by an American Jewish social scientist, Samuel Calmin Kohs, to count Jews for social welfare purposes. To create the list, Kohs asked a group of Jews and non-Jews to identify the names that they saw as exclusively Jewish; the agreed-upon 106 names on this list then became a part of Kohs’ counting methodology.
I find this list compelling for many reasons. For one thing, the names themselves—which include Goldberg, Epstein, Rosenberg—are just fascinating to look at. Individually, many of these names have been used as jokes or synecdoches for Jewishness. Brought together on one list, they offer a fascinating portrait of what it means to be a Jew: how Jews are perceived and understood through the linguistic signals of their names. One of the key points I hope to make in my book is that Jewish names do not have inherent Jewish meaning, but they were historically turned into racial markers of Jewish identity, markers that identified Jews and enabled their exclusion.
In addition to illuminating how Jewish names have determined and marked Jewish identity, the DJN list is a fascinating historical document of its moment, the early 1940s. Although Kohs initially constructed the list to help provide social services for Jews, he first used the list to help the National Jewish Welfare Board count the Jews fighting in World War II, in order to defend Jews against the claim that they evaded service. The list is thus a testament to the antisemitism of the era, while it also clearly notes how crucial Jewish names were for Jewish identity at this time.
Finally, the DJN list offers valuable methodological possibilities. If name change petitioners possessed one of these names, I counted them as Jews. (If they possessed other Jewish-sounding names, I used a host of other clues to determine if they were Jewish). As noted before, American Jewish historians have had difficulty studying secular Jews unaffiliated with the Jewish community. The distinctive Jewish names list—used judiciously, with appropriate qualifiers—can help historians to go beyond organizational records to consider secular Jews in America.
Certainly, using the DJN list throws a harsh light on the antisemitism that my research uncovered: using Kohs’ methodology, only about 3.75 percent of the New York population should have had a distinctive Jewish name found on the list. Yet roughly 30 percent of petitioners for a name change in New York City Civil Court had one of these 106 “distinctive Jewish names.” This disproportionality points to the stigma that Jewish names possessed during the 1940s, while it also offers insight into Jewish responses to that stigma.