Imagine this: You are stepping off the boat from Eastern Europe, freshly free from the pogroms and countless evils of Eastern Europe. You step up in line, ready to become a citizen of the United States of America, full of aspirations and dreams, and you hear the immigration officer ask the family in front of you what their name is. This plants a seed in your mind, “Hey, maybe I should change my name, get rid of some of the past I would rather forget.” That seed grows in your mind so much that when you step up and the immigration officer asks for your name, you say “Greenberg” instead of “Greenberger” or “Lepow” instead of “Lepowsky.” The latter of those two name changes actually belongs to my family, as my great-grandmother elected to change her name. However, did she elect to change her name the moment she stepped off the boat, filled with excitement, or did she decide to change it after facing discrimination, losing job opportunities, and mistreatment simply due to a name?

This question was sparked by a book I have recently read, called “People Love Dead Jews”(very uplifting title). In this book, the author, Dara Horn, talks of people changing their names when they came over to America. She says that although it is a myth that people changed their names at Ellis Island, many decided to change their names after facing discrimination, especially in the workplace. One such example of this is that of Max Greenberger, a US-born American Jew. He approached the New York City court in 1932 and asked for a name change, saying, “...the name Greenberger … is not helpful towards securing an appointment as an intern in a hospital,” (hospital intern being the chosen profession of his son). Here, we can see someone who does not fit the typical stereotypes of a Jew seeking a name change. He was not a recent immigrant, nor was he a performer seeking a stage name (think Harry Houdini). He was a white-collar man just seeking to better his family's life and to avoid some of the anti-semitism that he himself had faced in his life, whether it be difficulty getting a job or even going to a restaurant. 

Anti-semitism in America is one of the facts of the shared past of American Jews. For years before, after, and during the mass migration of Jews to the United States, anti-Semitism spread in conjunction with the other xenophobic beliefs of 19th and 20th century America. Signs were posted outside hotels and restaurants stating “No Jews or Dogs allowed,” creating an aura of outright animosity for Jewish people and giving new Jewish immigrants a true knowledge of what they were to face in this “new world.”  Facing all this discrimination, especially in the workplace, where employment offerings stated “sabbath observers need not apply,” many felt that for the betterment of their families. It seemed like the smart option to change their name, to make their name more generic or less recognizable as a Jewish name. They did it for the betterment of their families' lives so their children could get white-collar jobs, move west, and become our grand or great-grandparents. 

This unique process, not of changing names straight off of the boat from Russia but rather by changing names in court, was almost wholly unique to American Jews, as there were plenty of difficult last names to pronounce in the United States (Julliard, DiMaggio, Vanderbilt, Earhart, Eisenhower), but it seems, for the most part, only American Jews decided to change their last names. This process, and fact, is heartbreaking. The emotion that must have been felt, seeing that there is no other good option other than to change your family name, must have hurt people to the core. In a book written by Kirsten Fermaglich, she found that persons with Jewish-sounding last names made up 65% of all name change requests in New York in the first quarter of the 20th century. Changing our name now represents a unique part of our past, but for these people, it was part of a very real and harsh reality. 

The story of the last name-changing is not all anti-semitism and losing family history, though, because it worked.  Springing from the humble beginnings of immigrants, we were eventually able to grow as a community and a culture and spread throughout the United States.  One of the most ironic parts of the name-change ordeal is the fact that many of the new last names that people elected to change to, like Greenberg, are now common Jewish last names. Jews in America were able to make a new name for themselves.