[Singing in Hebrew]
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The Great Train Robbery was a silent film released in 1903,
considered to be the first American Western.
Bronco Billy Anderson, also known as Gilbert Anderson,
born Maxwell Aaronson.
He was a Jewish actor and he played four roles.
Bronco Billy was the first celebrity cowboy,
a Jewish man whose parents came from Russia and Germany,
and he eventually starred in 300 Western films.
There's a belief that, well, East Coast is the only place to be Jewish.
How can you be Jewish in a place where you can't get good bagels?
Interestingly, 1903 was also the year that Emma Lazarus' the New Colossus
was inscribed onto the Statue of Liberty.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. "
Emma Lazarus was a writer, a poet, an American Jew.
Her family were Sephardic Jews originally.
My name is Scott Gerber, but my Jewish name is Shoyle Baer.
My great grandfather who I'm named from, they were in Ukraine.
Jews weren't allowed to own land.
It was a bad deal.
There was a lot of segregation.
The oppression that Jews have been experiencing
in Europe had been taking place for over a thousand years.
They were leaving behind Europe,
the Old World, and going to America, the New World.
My grandfather, when he was of age to serve in the Tsarist's army,
he had to serve or they would have taken the family's possessions.
He somehow got a furlough,
which was really rare for Jews and he was supposedly a good marksman.
So that was his chance.
The United States as a whole represented freedom, liberty, hope.
Many Jews who arrived in New York City realized
they were still experiencing hate, prejudice oppression,
so the opportunity to go westwards to these new communities,
represented the American Dream.
It would have represented the myth of the West.
We know that there is a much darker kind of tone
to the story with Manifest Destiny.
But at that time, to Jews going to the United States,
going westward, and settling new towns,
would have represented better futures for your children.
They'd come either through Galveston,
or New Orleans, or New York, and they would move west
when they saw the opportunity. They would become peddlers.
They'd come to a small town that didn't have a store.
They'd say, "Ah, here's a place to settle. "
I've worked here probably about 34 years.
A lot of horseback work, as a ranch hand. It means a lot.
You know, I raised my kids here.
Antisemitism, was not, it was present,
but it wasn't a huge issue as it was in other places in America.
You had something to offer.
It was a pioneer spirit, it was welcomed.
For Jewish people who had been living in legalized, systemic,
genocidal oppression for hundreds and hundreds of years,
the idea that they could help build somewhere was incredibly profound.
There was a woman at the O. K. Corral.
She never wanted you to hear about her.
More important for her was that you knew
about her much more famous husband, Wyatt Earp.
Josephine Marcus Earp was born in 1860.
Her parents were Jewish immigrants
who had come to New York in the '40s or so,
and had settled in the Lower East Side.
The Marcus family were sort of struggling in New York,
and so they did what many other Jews did,
which was make a second hop, the first hop from Prussia to New York,
and then the second hop from New York to San Francisco.
San Francisco was the center of the Gold Rush.
Things were happening fast and furious.
From a Jewish perspective, it had been settled pretty early.
There were already several synagogues there.
You know the old joke about two Jewish families
and there have to be two Jewish synagogues.
It was such an important community that on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,
the steamer service,
which connected San Francisco to the rest of the world, was suspended.
No one told more tall tales about their past than Josephine.
She was full of whoppers.
She told everybody that her father was a wealthy German merchant
and that she was from this very affluent,
successful family in San Francisco.
Uh, wrong. Not true.
She was from a very poor family.
Josephine fell in love with the theater.
Of course, theater was huge in San Francisco in this era.
She ran away from home to become an actress.
She wasn't a particularly good actress,
but they were so hard up for people that they were literally taking
people off the street to bring them to Tombstone.
The young Josephine was a showstopper.
She would come into a room
and would light up the room with her personality,
her feistiness, small tumbling curls.
Tombstone was one of the biggest of the mining towns.
A Jewish city girl in the territories was very unusual.
I think it was part of the way in
which Josephine would stand out in a place like Tombstone.
Wyatt was drop-dead handsome.
Tall and straight and serious-looking, and that bushy mustache.
Really, there was a reason that he became known as the "Lion of Tombstone"
He was just gorgeous.
I think chemistry ruled.
Chemistry brought them together
and chemistry kept them together for nearly 50 years.
I imagine because we don't know for sure
that they met at Sol Israel's newspaper stand,
because that's where everybody went.
Wyatt Earp and his brothers were prominent at the time.
He was the federal marshal.
Josephine was the apex of a love triangle.
On the one hand, you had her former lover,
her former fiancé, Johnny Behan,
who was allied with the cowboys and the ranchers of Tombstone
and was the local Cochise County Sheriff.
And then, on the other hand,
you had Josephine's current lover allied with the miners
and the townspeople.
So they were both lawmen but with different jurisdictions
and very different political leanings.
The day of the O. K. Corral,
many of the participants have been out drinking
and carousing the night before.
There were a number of robberies leading up to that moment.
You had Johnny Behan and his supporters on one side,
although Johnny himself was not in the shootout.
And then you had Wyatt and his brothers and Doc Holliday on the other side.
Gunshots started, no one knew exactly who fired the first one.
And the only person who was standing, the only person
who had not been hit by bullets at the end of this was Wyatt Earp.
The aftermath of the gunfight at the O. K.
Corral went on for months,
as Wyatt and Johnny circled each other seeking revenge for the people
who had been hurt or killed.
Josephine visits with her parents,
who must have been so confused about this daughter of theirs.
Wyatt shows up in San Francisco,
introduces himself to Mr. and Mrs. Marcus,
and takes Josephine off to start their life together.
They had a lifetime of adventure that just never ended.
They followed the frontier wherever the frontier took them.
It took them eventually to the frontier of Alaska,
which in 1899, was the center of excitement in the whole world.
You've probably heard the expression "The Frozen Chosen,"
these were the Jews of Alaska who were absolutely front and center.
Then towards the end of their life, Hollywood beckoned,
because Hollywood was the new frontier.
Frontiers can be defined in lots of different ways.
Underneath it all was a sense of adventure,
of change, of entrepreneurial energy,
which, after all, are very Jewish traits.
Josephine never hid that she was Jewish.
I think the best way to describe it is she was indifferent.
Wyatt had more Jewish friends than Josephine.
Henry Fonda played the role of Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine.
And when he was prepping for the role,
he met someone who actually had been at the Seder for the Marcus family
and reported to him how Wyatt put his guns down
and put a kippah on his head.
Wyatt was famous for the rest of his life.
Josephine was very, very good at public relations
and understood celebrity in a very contemporary way.
When Wyatt died, it was a front-page news story.
No one knew where Wyatt was buried for almost 30 years,
but at the end of the day, she buried Wyatt in a Jewish cemetery.
And there they are in the Hills of Eternity in Colma, California.
And why did she do that?
I think at the end of his life,
and then towards the end of hers, Josephine, as all of us do,
began taking stock and being Jewish was part of her taking stock.
Some came by land and some by sea to seek their fortunes and fame,
and one merchantman from Bavaria was Levi Strauss by name,
was Levi Strauss by name.
When people think of Levi Strauss,
of course, they always think about the jeans.
Levi Strauss was born Löb Strauss
in Buttenheim which is in the Franconian region of Bavaria in Germany.
There had been this really draconian law passed called the Judenedikt.
It specified that Jewish men could
not engage in their traditional occupations,
which was basically cattle trading and peddling.
They were expected to become farmers or small merchants,
soap makers, you know, whatever.
So it was very difficult for young Jewish men to make a living
and make a life and a lot of them began to emigrate.
Levi's father died in 1846 and his mother had no choice, but to emigrate.
There was not only no job for Levi as a young man,
there was another thing that happened
under this Judenedikt called the matrikel.
Young Levi, who was still named Löb at this point, and his two sisters
and his mother moved to the Lower East Side of New York.
His brothers were already there.
It's 1848 by now.
They might have had a storefront,
but most likely, they were urban peddlers.
And they had retail customers in New York City, maybe down at the docks.
In late 1849, 1850, news of the California Gold Rush was
beginning to filter back to New York City,
and a lot of Jewish men went to California
because they knew there would be amazing opportunities,
mercantile opportunities for these young men.
These men did not go to sit in a freezing river and pan gold.
They went to either open wholesale businesses in San Francisco
or retail businesses in the California Gold Country.
I like to imagine there was this dinner
table conversation among the Strausses, and the brothers are saying,
"We need to take advantage of the opportunities in California.
You're the youngest. You're not married.
You're going to California,"
But they had to wait for one important thing to happen,
and that was for Levi to become an American citizen,
which he became on January 31st, 1853.
And on February 5th, 1853,
he got on a boat from New York which went down to the Isthmus of Panama.
He crossed the Isthmus of Panama,
went up the California coast on a steamer
and arrived in San Francisco on March 14th, 1853.
The Gold Rush not only changed California forever,
it changed the whole country forever.
For one thing, it was disastrous to the Indigenous people
that were here in California, of course. Whole cultures were disrupted,
many whole cultures were destroyed.
There was, of course,
environmental devastation because of the way the gold was mined.
Also it brought so many different people
from so many different cultures into California and really began what,
I think one of California's greatest strengths is its diversity.
Among those were Jews,
who came to San Francisco and found a lot less antisemitism
than they had experienced in New York City.
Levi Strauss came to San Francisco
to open up a wholesale dry goods business.
His brothers would put shiploads of dry goods into clipper ships.
Dry goods were blankets, clothing,
handkerchiefs, boots, you know, soft goods.
By the 1860s, he had customers all over California,
the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, and Mexico.
Jacob Davis was born Jacob Youphes in Riga, which is now Latvia.
He came to the United States when he was a teenager,
worked on the East Coast for a while, trained as a tailor.
By 1868, he was living in the literally brand new town of Reno, Nevada.
In late 1870, early 1871, a woman came into a shop and said,
"Can you make a pair of pants for my husband that don't fall apart?"
Pants, pants, strong sturdy pants, that's what we need to survive.
Jacob was making a pair of pants out of a fabric called white duck,
duck is like canvas.
He also made horse blankets and tents,
and he used little metal rivets to strengthen the points of strains.
And I like to imagine he looked over at the table and he thought,
"Huh, there's some rivets over there.
I wonder if I put them in these pants
if that will make them stronger?" So he did.
You can see on the front is pretty much the same as day one in 1873.
There were rivets on the corners of the front pockets.
Also from the beginning was this little watch pocket.
A 19th Century pocket watch fits perfectly in there.
The woman comes to pick up her pants.
They were $3 which was a premium price,
takes them away and comes back and says,
"My husband loves the pants," and word got out.
Jacob knew about Levi Strauss's reputation for integrity,
so what does he do?
He writes him a letter and says, "I've created this new kind of pants.
And I want to take a patent out on this
but I really need a business partner.
What do you think?"
He includes a few examples of these pants.
On May 20th, 1873,
patent number 139121 was issued to Jacob Davis as an individual
and Levi Strauss and Co,
the corporation for an improvement in fastening pocket openings,
which was basically the invention of the blue jean.
Levi Strauss had a number of strengths.
One of them was the way he dealt with people.
He also was willing to work really, really hard.
He never married.
He devoted everything to his business.
The most American of garments,
one of the greatest American inventions of all came
about because of the collaboration between two immigrants.
They were good and bad, and hardy, and brave,
those rough and toughing old miners,
those rough and toughing old miners.
When I came up here in the early 1980s,
a fellow I ran into who was Jewish took me down and showed me
where the Jewish cemetery was.
And at that time, had been completely captured by the forest.
But there were about 60 tombstones still there
that were clearly recognizable.
None of them are especially famous,
but each one of them contributed to the community here.
Dr. Kahn here, for example,
was one of the few professionals in that generation.
Most of the Jews who came here then were fairly recent immigrants
and not members of the professional classes.
Most of the Jews up here were merchants
and I had a nagging notion that somebody ought to do something about this.
Leadville in its glory days,
in the late 1870s up till about 1893 was the largest
and most prosperous, wealthiest mining community in Colorado.
Well in the very first years of the Silver Rush,
there was enormous influx of people into this area.
The numbers might have ranged as high as 30,000 or so.
It was common, for example,
for the prospectors to sleep on the floors of the bars for 25 or 50 cents a night.
Leadville was such an important city in its era.
That in 1882, Oscar Wilde passed through here and proceeded to a bar.
And he noticed the sign on the wall above the piano asking the patrons to,
"Please, not shoot the piano player. He's doing his best. "
Jews lived all over town, although they did tend to concentrate
around the main avenue, Harrison Avenue, where their businesses were.
One of the most interesting things that we've discovered
was a series of Purim Balls up here.
They went on for 18 or 19 years,
and they're one of the highlights of the social season for the whole town.
In many ways, this was an extremely good place to be Jewish.
Maurice Mankowitz was a tailor.
The family's plot here.
We have the Shayers.
Shayers were whiskey wholesalers.
These are the Janowitzes, also whiskey merchants.
[music]
Jews dominated the wholesale liquor business up here.
They sold groceries. One fellow ran
a fairly large successful laundry for awhile.
There were, of course, pawnbrokers, jewelers.
Quite a few Jews had bars.
David May and the May Corporation
which over time became one of the largest
department store chains in America.
He opened up a store on the avenue here.
The most famous name associated with Leadville would be Guggenheim.
The Guggenheims, of course, are famous now for their museums,
but their beginnings were much less exalted.
Meyer Guggenheim had been born in Switzerland in 1827,
came to America in the late 1840s.
And he came with, at least, two of his brothers.
And they set up shop in Philadelphia.
In 1880, he was offered the chance to buy a quarter interest in a pair
of mines a little bit to the Southeast of Leadville.
The mine itself proved to be extremely valuable.
Producing originally gold, but then mostly silver.
Over time, they were taking out some tens of thousands
of dollars a month from this mine.
He begins to expand.
Now, part of this expansion includes his seven sons.
By 1900, they have established themselves as the American Smelting
and Refining Company, ASARCO.
They become enormously
important in the industrialization of America,
and Leadville itself is a very good example
of the industrialization of the American West.
You have literally millions of people moving to the west,
and most of them are looking for this elusive opportunity.
And most of them do not strike it rich.
Most of the people who came out here led,
what we would see is very normal lives.
They worked, they had families, they prospered moderately.
Meyer Guggenheim was a little bit lucky
that his first investment up here was so successful.
We're in a fully restored 1884 Reform synagogue.
There are no Jews here now that are related to people
who were here back in the pioneer days.
My family didn't get this far until my generation,
but these people were very similar to the people that were my ancestors.
And I felt I owed them some obligation to not let this be lost.
"Now I hear a mighty voice proclaim
that each in the world is for the other.
That for thee is not for one, but for all. "
Ray Frank was the first woman to preach
from a synagogue pulpit in the United States
and probably in the world.
Moreover, she just had a voice that people listened to.
She was born in San Francisco.
Her parents were Polish immigrants who were Orthodox.
She was educated quite well in Oakland, California.
And she became a teacher.
She wrote.
She was traveling and writing to different towns in the West.
We are right now in the sanctuary of Temple Sinai.
It's the oldest Jewish community in Oakland.
I'm the Senior Rabbi.
This synagogue was founded in 1875,
and at the time was called the First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland.
Ray Frank, one of the first teaching jobs that she had as a Judaic
studies teacher was here at our Sabbath School.
She was traveling in 1890 and ends up in Spokane,
Washington right before the High Holy Days.
It's right before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
And she asks the community, "Where's the synagogue?
Where are services going to be?"
A man said, "Look, if you can get everyone together
and if you will preach, we'll make sure that you a congregation. "
And she said, "Okay. "
And she did and she got up, and she gave a talk that was essentially about
the importance of Jews coming together.
"But, of course, Jewish matters have a special attraction
for me for am I not of the Jewish race?
Am I not bound by all the deepest ties of blood, honor,
and affection to be loyal to them and to do my little all to help them?"
People heard about this, the girl preacher,
and she became known as the "Golden Girl Rabbi of the West"
Never became a rabbi, was never ordained,
but spoke about religion and spoke about morals.
She became quite popular.
I am Chinese and Jewish, the first Chinese American rabbi.
Having two firsts coming out of the same synagogue,
I think that's Oakland.
I think that's the East Bay.
I think that that's California.
My Chinese family came here in the 1880s.
My great, great grandfather first came in 1888.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was meant
to put a moratorium on immigration from China, specifically for laborers.
My great grandfather took him five years from the first time
that he applied for an exemption until he was able to come.
The opportunities were not equal.
Chinese people were from certain kinds of jobs,
from living in certain places.
So my father's side of the family were from Vienna,
Austria, and they came to this country in 1938.
So they fled Nazi Europe.
In some ways the challenges are similar.
I think just being in a new country,
learning a new language, learning a new system.
Ray Frank had this opportunity in the Wild West
where she might not have had in other ways
because things were not as established because roots were not laid
down because things were still starting up.
And out of necessity, she was the one who could do it.
I imagine that Ray Frank's biggest challenges
were in the interpersonal interactions that she had,
where people would probably dismiss her or would be condescending to her.
When is it okay to be bold?
When is it okay to be quiet?
That's about testing boundaries.
Ray Frank's work changed how people understand the possibilities,
how people understand who can teach Torah.
It took another 80 some odd years for the first woman to be ordained
as a rabbi in the United States in the Reform Movement.
But there has to be a first.
Had she not started to change the story and the narrative,
it wouldn't be where it is now.
Women have always been leaders in Jewish history,
and that starts with Eve.
From the very beginning, we see the tension between women's leadership
and women's drive to move forward and to choose their own destiny.
Ray Frank was often called the Deborah of the West,
and I think it is a fantastic comparison.
Deborah was a judge.
We find her story in the Book of Judges
and people sought her wisdom that they came
from all around to speak with her.
I think that Ray Frank, it's a very similar kind of a story.
"Men must learn from nature
that she is the greatest of God's preachers.
That sky, ocean, nations, recs, babes,
worms preached ages ago and continue to preach.
I, knowing this, feel I must wherever and whenever I can,
preach my message. "
Where we are is at the White Rock Overlook.
It looks down to the Rio Grande.
When I first made daguerreotype and was looking for landscape scenery,
it's very close to the first place I came.
Daguerreotype was the first practical form of photography.
It was introduced to the public in 1839 by a Frenchman named
Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre.
As soon as it was made public, it became a craze, a fanatic activity.
Most of the daguerreotypes that were made were portraits done in studios.
Outdoors was much more difficult.
Solomon Nunes Carvalho, so that's a Portuguese name.
He began as a painter.
Then he took up the daguerreotypy.
He was a Sephardic Jew.
He grew up in Charleston, South Carolina,
where there was a large Jewish community.
Colonel John Charles Fremont was the most romantically,
heroic explorer of that time, of the mid-19th Century.
Everyone would've known who he was.
He was part of Manifest Destiny.
This way of thinking that the continent
really belonged to the white invaders.
Fremont helped enable that sort of thing.
In 1853, Fremont began looking for a daguerreotypist.
The plan was to go through the Rocky Mountains
in the winter before heavy snowfall,
and then to return after the winter was basically over
and document the snowpack to see if the snow
was going to be an impediment to a railroad.
The idea was to create a photographic document
so that the naysayers would be silenced.
Carvalho immediately took up the offer to come
on the Fifth Expedition as daguerreotypist.
It was something completely outside his experience.
Something, obviously, very dangerous entering the unknown
and an adventure of the first magnitude.
They launched in the fall of 1853.
He says he made daguerreotypes almost every day
until he was forced to abandon his equipment.
It's hard to try to reconstruct how he did that.
With all these equipment being borne on three mules,
weighing 150 pounds and having to unpack it,
make the exposures, pack it up again,
and the result being well behind the expedition on the trail.
We don't have any but one of his original daguerreotype.
One of the pictures shows three
or four tipis and probably two or three standing men in it,
but it's severely damaged.
Carvalho made portraits of the Cheyenne.
The ones that are the best images are steel engravings.
They were created from his daguerreotype.
Which made me think it would be a good idea
to try to reconstruct the expedition, so I did that.
I followed, as far as I could determine, Fremont's route.
I made daguerreotypes first when I could find
where the source of the engravings were,
which I found all of them in the end.
Alright, here's one of them.
This is a daguerreotype photograph that I made.
The scene is the Upper Little Cimarron Drainage.
It's looking south.
The weather was remarkably mild until they crossed the Continental Divide
and they became burdened with deepening snows
for the rest of the trip until they got to Utah.
They kept butchering their mules and their horses as the animals failed.
And, of course, it's not kosher.
Horses and mules are not.
And Carvalho was anxious about having to eat them,
but justified it as an extreme emergency to support life.
They were near-death before they reached
a town of Parowan in the Great Basin.
It was a Mormon settlement, just four years old.
He becomes an acquaintance of Brigham Young,
who is very interested in having a Jew visit the community.
He may have been the first Jew to show up there.
I think it satisfied his yearning for adventure.
He never went west again.
He never indulged in adventures again.
When he described his astonishment of the magnificent views,
one of his favorite words was "sublime"
which is really in the 19th Century
meant a combination of beauty and terror.
[singing]
It's 1882 when the first railroad came through.
And the old men used to tell stories
about how the old people would lay down on the ground
and listen with their ears to the ground.
And the Mother Earth was telling them, "Hey, something's coming your way. "
"It's thundering and it's not going to be rain. "
Acoma is situated west of Albuquerque about 70 miles.
The railroad made a huge difference.
It expanded their economy to
the Acoma woman, you know, they're well known for their pottery.
And they started marketing their pottery at the railroad tracks.
This is my grandma Lucy Lewis's pot.
My grandma was a mathematical genius.
She could take a pot and just start painting
so that everything lined up symmetrical.
Also, the men got jobs with the railroad, which took them off Acoma lands.
A lot of people wound up in Arizona,
California, even down to Texas, Oklahoma.
It has always been Haak'u
It referred to Acoma as Haak'ume or Haak'umetra.
The old Acoma folks, our ancestors, referred to that as "The People"
Acoma is considered to be the oldest inhabited city in the country.
Historians have mentioned that there were approximately six
to seven thousand people that lived on the Mesa.
They lived in structures that were three to four stories high.
Kind of like New York City at a smaller scale.
The Spanish killed a lot of Acoma people on the Mesa.
They took it by force.
Some seven hundred people were killed both men, women, and children.
A lot of them held captive and taken to Mexico and Spain.
With the Europeans came different kinds of illnesses
and a lot of our people were devastated by the smallpox, other infections.
By the mid-1850s, I believe, their population
was somewhere around 350, 360 at the most, maybe, at that time.
[music]
Solomon Bibo came to the United States mainly because
he had been told stories in Prussia
and joined his brothers out here in New Mexico,
who were already established in mercantile business.
He had started trading with the Acoma.
Not only the Acoma, but also other tribes close by.
The Laguna people, as well as the US Calvary.
He was a good friend of the Acoma.
And he learned the language even.
He was the least proficient in English, [laughs]
but he could speak Acoma and Spanish well.
The Acoma started calling Don.
Don Solomono.
There isn't much written about Juana Valle.
I found about her trying to find out about my dad's relatives.
My dad's mom was cousins of Juana's mom and grandmother.
Juana's grandfather was the Governor for several years.
He became friends with Solomon through trading
and Solomon was introduced to Juana.
If he had a trading post here,
then they probably would have struck up a conversation and just talked.
He asked permission to marry Juana.
Don Solomono sent Juana back East to learn English,
and to learn a little bit about the Jewish faith.
I believe it was New York.
And so few months passed and she came back.
It was very unique.
At that point, I don't think there was any Acomas
and other ethnic groups intermarrying.
Don Solomono passed away in 1934.
Their marriage lasted that long and Juana passed away in 1941.
So they had a good number of years together.
Juana learned the business.
Apparently she was the money gal.
She was a very good businesswoman.
She was pretty savvy with the money.
Our people are matriarchal.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that she stepped
into this role to help her husband.
He had like 20,000 head of sheep that he grazed on Acoma lands.
It was a very profitable business for him.
Don Solomono was involved with helping the Acoma
in keeping their lands intact.
Because at the time there was a lot of homesteaders
that were coming on the Indian lands, just settling wherever.
He was trying to safeguard their lands.
The President of United States had authority to assign Indian agents
to just basically, kind of,
watch the native Indigenous people in the region.
They were not Indian.
There was a time there was an agent
during Don Solomono's time here at Acoma, Peter Sanchez.
The Indian agents that were out here,
they were all favorable to the squatters at the time,
or the land grabbers as we call them.
Sanchez was trying to get rid of Don Solomono because he was,
I think jealous of the way the Acoma treated Don Solomono.
Sanchez thought it was a scam.
He always calling him "the Rich Jew. "
The gentleman didn't like each other.
Eventually, Sanchez was the one to be booted out of office.
Don Solomono, he had the confidence of the Acoma people.
And so it was shortly thereafter that there was another Indian
agent that appointed him as Governor of Acoma.
What that group of leaders said about Don Solomono was that he was
instrumental in writing out a map on a piece of deerskin or buffalo skin.
He had marked where the lands were regarding Acoma land,
the boundaries of those.
The Acoma were never taken off elsewhere away from their lands.
We always had that land base.
Even though some of our Acoma people are professionals
in various fields throughout the country they still come home.
We live and breathe our Native American culture
everyday. We take that strength and resilience
and apply it to everything we do.
You have the Spanish government,
then the Mexican government, then the US government.
All these different governments have come in to try to take our lands.
If you have somebody who comes in,
who is an outsider, wanting to protect the land then,
of course, you are going to hold them in a deep respect.
When I go up to the old place, it's kind of nostalgic feeling.
Sometimes, we pull over and just look out throughout the valley
and think about the ancestors.
What happened here, there would often be a gathering of young,
smart Jews who were immigrants to America.
And they would sit around the table debating.
[music]
You shouldn't believe that.
This is what you should believe.
And a lot of it is centered around ideas of socialism
because those were very prominent at the time.
Golda would always look for excuses to hang around the table,
including washing the cups.
Disinfecting the teacups because of the illness
because of tuberculosis.
Golda Meir was one of the early Prime Ministers of Israel.
She was the first woman in the 20th Century to lead a country
who had no connection to any male family members.
She was truly an independent.
Born 1898, end of the 19th Century into the beginning of the 20th Century,
while she was living in, then Russia,
she witnessed what political violence
can do to a country because of her Jewish,
her religion, culture, she was a target with their family.
The first memory of many, many Jews.
The first thing they remember like I,
is when my father and the upstairs neighbors
were nailing up the doors because the rumors were that
there's going to be another pogrom in Kiev.
It was lasting impact, had a lasting impact.
[music]
She came to the United States when she was eight.
The family went to Milwaukee.
She became an American citizen on her father's citizenship papers.
She developed a strong sense of,
if you knew in your mind that something was right, that's what you did.
Ultimately, what counts, are actions.
She was never a theorist.
She's in school and sees kids have to buy their textbooks.
Free school, not free textbooks.
She starts a group, a committee, with a good friend
who are the only two members of that committee to raise money
to buy textbooks for poor kids.
That's pretty impressive for a young kid.
So she has a real sense of duty and responsibility,
which is with her all her life.
Much of it is centered on her Jewish identity.
She loves education.
She finishes her early years of education.
Time to go on to high school.
Her parents aren't thrilled with that.
Why does a girl have to go to high school for?
She had feminist views before there was modern day feminism.
And her view is she wants an education.
That's where this split in the family kind of takes place
and that's where Denver emerges from that division.
Lots of people come to Denver for lung rehabilitation.
Her sister ends up here with tuberculosis, older sister.
They write to each other about Golda running away, essentially.
Because she knows if she says, "Can I go to Denver?"
It's not going to be a positive reception.
She knew what she wanted and she went after it.
She comes to Denver in 1913, February.
It's probably just about two years she's here.
This was a fairly new building when she lived here with her sister.
So if you look, there was just a couple of rooms and there was husband,
wife, young daughter and Golda.
Here's one of local interest.
People in Denver will know North High School
and that's the North High School class that Golda was part of. Her sister
who was the activist hosted lots of people here.
Now you have to, again, understand because of tuberculosis,
this house was kind of a meeting place for a lot of younger,
starting off intellectuals who were interested in ideas,
political concepts.
She was forming those ideas and all of this discussion was her education.
That's why she was a lifelong, never varied from this,
Socialist Zionist was her belief system.
And that system always has an element of flexibility, right? Of realism.
One of her big disappointments in life was, as Israel, over time,
fell into hard times in the eyes of other people in the world,
other countries, she felt, "We're the democratic socialists
and you are siding with the authoritarians and the dictators.
We are the people who believe what you believe. "
That was something that bothered her enormously.
One of the people that hung out for these discussions,
usually evening discussions, was Morris Meyerson,
who she eventually marries.
He's part of all these discussions.
She said it's really where her education in many ways began.
Those late nights sitting by washing teacups from people
who had tuberculosis.
They must have talked to one another to pick
this place because they all came here. [chuckles]
Well, they originally went to New York.
They spent several years in New York and moved here.
They said tuberculosis was one of the reasons.
My father, Louis Dinner and mother
came from Vilna, Gubernia
which is the southern most province of the Ukraine.
They had half-brothers.
My dad did.
They came over earlier and were located in Denver and Greeley, Colorado.
They left Europe because I'm sure of the pogroms.
It seems like a billion people came out at that little county.
Our great-grandfather was a dairy farmer.
Louis Robinson came to New York in probably 1883, and then to Colorado.
Hard to raise cows on Fifth Avenue.
There were a number of Jewish families here.
He came here and lived in Denver for a couple years on Federal Boulevard,
right near the home where Golda Meir is.
And he would pedal with a horse and buggy.
Then they moved to Greeley
where the other half-brothers already lived.
All the brothers were in the cattle business.
They started at Orthodox Synagogue.
It was Mechitza-type synagogue.
He bought some real estate and started dealing in cattle.
They would buy cattle.
Then they would bring 'em back into the corrals,
feed 'em over the winter and sell them at the stockyards.
He and other visionaries in the field saw
that you could build a larger feed lot and feed year round,
and that evolved into major feed lots.
That's how the stockyard grew.
This area of the country, Greeley in particular, became the hub
of cattle feeding almost in the nation.
If you bought at the Denver stockyards,
you'd go every Monday, we'd go there and buy cattle.
Well, it's still one of the major stockyards in the country.
They called us a Cow Town.
We were called a Cow Town.
His great-grandfather, Lazar, was a dear friend of my father.
Lazar came up with his black horse, black suit, and bowler hat,
and stopped and said [in Yiddish]?
Which to the uninitiated is, "How are you doing young man?
I used to remember, as a kid, when I'd see him,
he'd kiss me and that beard, his beard was something else.
He spoke very little English.
He was well thought of.
He was a very respected cattle buyer.
Imagine seeing Fiddler on the Roof with cowboy boots.
Everybody looked up to him.
[music]
To haul a whole load or so from the railhead,
which was the dominant source of transportation, to the feedlot
we would have to drive him by horse from the railhead to the feedlot.
We became pretty good horsemen no matter what.
We rode horses bareback, saddle, standing on top almost.
The cowboy fashion design had nothing to do with them.
A lot of the cattle industry in this area
came from areas like Cincinnati, Ohio,
where the original German Jews started it,
or upper New York, in the dairy farms. Suits, ties, and hats.
No, it wasn't even cowboy hats then.
Louis wore this hat is not a Western hat.
It's a Borsalino, an Italian-made Western hat.
The first cattle trip I was sent on that was really major,
2,000 head of cattle in Alliance, Nebraska,
Dad sent me with the broker.
He came back and told my father that I did an excellent job.
My excellent job was I kept my mouth shut.
One day, I counted up how many states I bought cattle in
and there were 27 states and two countries
and a loaded cattle from Hawaii even.
[music]
"The solitary man pulls on his long beard
and looks upon this scene so wonderful and unexpected. "
Shall I do it again?
Let me see this.
I couldn't see the periods.
"Here stands this pioneer out of the heart of the great American West. "
"He looks upon his head of grazing cows,
scratches his head under his yarmulke,
and tugs on his long beard in wonder at life's twists and turns.
He takes a puff on his clay pipe and smiles. "
Not being persecuted, not being maligned, he was free.
That's why they all came to this country.
Mother had one sister who came over with her.
Her father went back
and then the rest of the family was all lost in the Holocaust.
For me, as a Jewish cowboy,
if my parents hadn't come here, I wouldn't be here.
[music]
Really starting in 1881 and progressing over the next few decades,
you have a stream of Jews from Eastern Europe coming.
That stops in about 1924 with the passage
of the Johnson Anti-Immigration Act.
[music]
For the most part, Eastern European Jews are going to cities.
New York is their primary destination,
and then they're going to specific neighborhoods within cities.
And the fear of the established Jews,
the Jews that tended to be of Central European background was that,
"Oh no, they're never going to assimilate. "
The German Jews, I would say, felt a great sense
of responsibility for these Eastern European Jews,
most of them who had been fleeing extreme poverty and persecution.
"If they're living on Hester Street, in the tenement district,
they're all going to become radicals living in concentrated areas,
speaking Yiddish, working in the garments trades, protesting this, that.
They also might make Jews, as a class, look bad. "
[music]
Jacob Schiff was a German Jewish financier, a banker,
who becomes a really prominent Jewish leader.
He lives uptown. He's a reformed Jew.
He becomes very involved.
His voice and his leadership was really important
to responding to this wave of East European Jews.
What Jacob Schiff thought
is that it doesn't matter where you come from,
it doesn't matter what your religion
is as long as you really love American ideals,
then you're the best American.
The way that this manifests itself
is through the Industrial Removal Office
which would end up sending upwards
of 75,000 Jews to the West between 1901 and 1922.
They organized to send Jews to Galveston,
Texas, where a new port was opening up, thinking,
reasoning that if they bypass New York City,
they're going to really send these Jews out into the West.
The Galveston Movement resettled upwards
of 10,000 Jews to different parts of the West.
We have the letters that some of those immigrants
wrote back to the office and some of them are saying, "Thank you so much.
I love it here in Colorado. "
or, "I love it here in Texas.
Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. "
Others writing,
"The ground should open up and swallow you for all the tzores,
all the sorrow you have caused me because I'm in the middle of nowhere
and I have no one who understands my culture and what am I doing here?"
Cotopaxi is a small town in Colorado about 30 miles from Canyon City.
It was the site of a brief Jewish
agricultural colony that lasted from 1882 to 1884.
One of the residents there, a prominant resident,
was Emmanuel Saltiel, a Sephardic Jew,
and he owned a great deal of land in Cotopaxi.
And he connected with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society tried to work
with resettling some of the Eastern European immigrants
and dispersing them throughout the United States.
And Saltiel came to them with the plan.
In exchange for $10,000,
he was going to provide tracts of land for the settlers,
housing, farming implements.
[music]
We're here at the Jewish Colony site
or what I've always known as the Jewish Colony site.
When I was younger, I used to ride horses up here
and the houses were actually still standing then.
We get in 1882, a group of originally 50,
then grew to about 63 Russian Jewish immigrants.
To their great disappointment, when they got to Cotopaxi,
all they found were really crudely constructed, very small cabins.
They were challenged from the beginning
with the lack of irrigation, the lack of water.
The weather was a big factor in why they didn't stay.
They got frozen out. Early frost the first summer.
Then the second year, they planted early,
and then they got an early spring snowstorm.
While the farming was very, very difficult,
their religious life really flourished.
The families together worked as a unit and for Passover,
one group walked to Salida to get
flour so they could bake their own matzos.
They celebrated the Sabbath together and religious holidays.
Whether Saltiel was the villain in the story,
is somewhat controversial.
He had to know that this would've been a challenge to the farmers
but some of his descendants feel that he was helpful.
He thought he was helping them.
Most of them moved into Denver
and they really, kind of, replicated very close to the Lower East Side of New York,
a Jewish neighborhood filled with small synagogues,
Jewish bakeries, meat markets.
Their children would stay in the West.
Maybe their grandchildren would and that led
to the growth of Jewish communities in the West.
Well this song is called "Zhankoye. "
It's a song. .
Under the Tsar of Russia in those days,
Jews couldn't own land so there were very few Jewish farmers and ranchers.
And this is a song that they sang that really showed the pride
and honor they felt to be able to get
back to working the land after centuries and centuries.
This is "Zhankoye. "
I'll do it first in Yiddish, and then I'll do it in English.
[Singing in Yiddish]
From the people I come from, this is the most important verse.
Work together, all as brothers,
in the fields and in the orchards for the better world to come.
All must work, for work is good, in work we find brotherhood.
[Singing in Yiddish]
Abraham Jacob Zlabovsky was our first ancestor here in the United States.
He had come from Belarus.
The area that they came from was Brahin.
It was a founding place for Hasidism.
The town's also famous, unfortunately, for pogroms. By the early 1900s,
so many people had left because of pogroms.
It looks like the entire shtetl was lifted and brought to Texas.
It's crazy to me how many people were interconnected in both San Antonio
and then in El Paso from the same places in Belarus.
[music]
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society used to stand like at the dock
when people were getting off the boat
and tell people to go to Texas because it was unchartered
and it was a great land of opportunity out there in Texas.
They started to plant seeds in San Antonio
and really built the Jewish community there and then from there,
they went to El Paso.
The patriarch on American side is Abraham.
Abraham started a meat market.
Abraham, he sold matzos on Pesach in the synagogue.
Abraham had nine children,
one of whom died in Belarus, but the other eight came.
The children in EL Paso were founding
fathers of the Orthodox synagogue there.
Frank came a couple of years after his dad.
Grandpa had a very decent store.
He had connections with stores throughout El Paso.
El Paso was a burgeoning community
and so it nurtured these large wholesalers
and turns out the wholesalers were Jewish.
The Jewish wholesalers were subsidizing him
in a way so that he could subsidize the campesinos,
the people who were working in the fields.
That was his clientele.
[music]
He sold them the necessities of life.
And they would offer him a dollar a week and he would accept it.
And that's the way he made his so-called living.
[music]
I heard that Frank sold Pancho Villa pants,
and I am going to stick with that.
I don't know what size they were
I wouldn't be surprised.
Or beige. Maybe they were beige, I don't know. [chuckles]
Pancho Villa was the General,
the Generalissimo, of Juarez at the time.
And there were houses that had giant porches that reached
out to Juarez so you could sit on the porch
and see the Revolution happening.
And you could see battles happening down there
and El Paso citizens would witness this.
I think life was very precarious at the time.
[music]
You come to Texas in the late 1800s, early 1900s,
like, you have to have a tenacious personality
or you're just going to get crushed by it.
I like to imagine Frank was, kind of, a little skinny, Jewish, Rough Rider
[laughs] kinda guy out there scrapping for what he wants
and, like, fighting for what he thought was right and taking down the bad guys.
I would go with him and he would stop underneath the Cottonwood
trees along the road, and we'd eat lunch together.
I have a picture. My brother and I have chaps on.
He used to buy us uniforms when we would come to visit him.
We were only this tall.
[music]
Sol didn't come with the rest of the family.
He had been in the Tzar's army.
And so after he served, he came to America.
This is Sol writing to Abraham, his father.
"How long ago was it?
Yet, not that long at all.
When I used to get up at 5:00 am in Brahin
and run to the synagogue to recite the Psalms,
the Hasidim thought I would grow up to be a Rabbi
or a Torah scholar and perhaps. .
Yes, who knows. Ah, what would I lack,
if I'd grown up in Brahin,
not knowing the wide world and the world not knowing of me?"
That's an interesting commentary.
Most of us are immigrants.
Most of us have some immigrant root.
These were people who came out and were headstrong
and forged their own identity in a whole new place.
[music]
I'm a fifth-generation Coloradan.
My great grandparents came from Russia and all the way across country,
I'm sure in wagons and with horses.
Rachel Kobey was my great, great, great grandmother.
She married Isaac Shwayder.
Young Rachel was supposedly very beautiful.
And she was also very strong
and had a lot of things that she wanted for her family.
She wanted them to have a better life than she did.
She wanted them to be more educated.
It was the 1800s.
It was hard for Jewish families in Russia at that time.
Rachel had two uncles that came to America before she did in Colorado.
They were able to bring over Rachel and Isaac.
[music]
I can't imagine how hard it would've been to leave everything
and just step into the unknown.
They had a service business
and a store so people would order things out of the store
and they would deliver them to various people
in Central City and Black Hawk.
Rachel and Isaac had 11 children.
Jesse Shwayder was born in Black Hawk in the 1800s.
[music]
Black Hawk was a really small town.
Rachel really felt like there weren't
the opportunities that she had hoped there would be.
The family moves to Denver.
Denver was a bigger city.
It had more people coming in and out of it
and they had a good school system
which was something that Rachel really valued.
When Jesse graduated from high school,
there wasn't enough money to send him to college.
Isaac died, Rachel gave the insurance money to Jesse
and she really encouraged him to start a business.
One of the main reasons for this was that she wanted to ensure
that every family member would have a job waiting for them.
The little luggage company becomes Samsonite luggage.
The name Samsonite comes from the Bible and the story of Samson.
And the meaning behind that is that Samson was very strong.
They used to advertise
because they were big hefty guys, this is family.
They would stand on the luggage strong enough to stand on.
I think it's really fun to look at how they decorated these trunks.
Yes, there's wood and leather and metal and studs.
Yes, it's beautiful.
I don't know how old this trunk is, but it is really old.
This is all Emmett's stuff.
Emmett was my great-grandfather
and he took over Samsonite luggage after Jesse.
I'm actually named after him and he really took Samsonite to a new level.
[music]
Samsonite becomes famous for luggage that's easy to carry around
and made of lightweight materials, which is a big contrast to the trunks.
Everyone that worked at Samsonite,
carried a Golden Rule marble that had written around it,
"Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. "
And I still carry mine with me in my backpack.
He told them, "Reach into your pocket when you have a decision to make,
and this will tell you how to make that decision. "
The lessons of hard work and generosity
have been very clearly passed down in my family.
My great-grandfather and my great-grandmother
were very philanthropic and very involved in the Denver community
and specifically the Denver Jewish community.
This family is very matriarchal,
even though I think Jesse and Emmett get a lot of the credit,
but it was really Rachel.
This one's Rachel and her kids.
Some of the kids.
You could see why they thought she was a force of nature.
Yes.
Rachel was determined to provide opportunities
that would be able to set her children up for success.
They couldn't fail.
They had to make a success.
[music]
We're in Isaacs Hardware in Clayton, New Mexico.
I was looking for a new charger for my drills, the wall drills.
Okay. All right, let's go see what I've got.
Robert Isaacs was my grandfather.
They were in England.
They went to Australia.
Granddad came later from Australia.
When he got to Clayton,
he joined his brother-in-law in the hardware business
and he took over the business here in 1898.
We were not big enough to have a synagogue,
or if you had any prayers, it was at home.
If I understand the Herzsteins and my father and two
or three other families would get together locally.
The first Herzsteins that we have recorded
in history were two brothers from Iberia
who left Spain to escape persecution.
Morris Herzstein was the first Herzstein to move West.
He came from a small town in Germany, Tielen.
He moved west to the New Mexico area in about 1886.
He first settled in Liberty, New Mexico,
where he began a store and soon recruited his brother, Levi.
Morris was out of town on a shopping trip,
and Levi was left in charge of the store.
And there were some travelers coming through who asked
or were offered a place to stay in the store overnight to stay dry.
Black Jack Ketchum was a member,
and probably a leader, of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang.
They were some of the most famous outlaws in the West.
Unfortunately, Levi and the local people didn't recognize them.
When they came to the store the next morning,
they realized that both the store
and the post office that they also ran had been robbed.
And Levi quickly gathered up a posse
and went after Black Jack Ketchum and his gang.
Black Jack opened fire and shot all the members of the posse.
Levi was killed.
[music]
Black Jack was sought after for years
and brought to trial for a train robbery.
That was a capital offense.
He was sentenced to death
and they sent Black Jack Ketchum back to Clayton to be hung.
Morris had left Liberty after his brother Levi died.
He had moved to Clayton, where he had started a very successful store,
and my great-grandfather, Simon, was coming out to join him.
He arrived just after the hanging of Black Jack.
Clayton is in the very northeast corner of New Mexico,
even today considered pretty remote.
In terms of Clayton, and the whole Southwest,
there were very, very few Jews
and very little Jewish community to hold yourselves together.
Simon helped him run this store.
And then in 1907, there was a fire that burnt down this whole beautiful,
big organized store.
This is The Clayton Citizen, published December 21, 1907.
In this newspaper, there are two-one-page ads
from M. Herzstein and Company announcing, "Fire, fire, fire. "
[music]
Simon's plan was to develop a ready-to-wear store.
His store then sold wedding dresses and all the refineries.
He was one of the biggest Stetson hat sales persons west of the Mississippi
and even had fashion shows at his store
where people from the community would come in
and parade around outside with hats and boots.
The slogan was, "If it's from Herzstein's, it's correct. "
He was very proud of that.
I think Mr. Isaacs and Mr. Herzstein
were pretty good friends.
This is my mother-in-law much she older.
This is just before she got married.
[music]
She worked right over there,
as a maid at the hotel.
Mrs. Isaacs said that one time she went out on the porch,
she heard this car drive up.
And these men in white gowns jumped out.
And she knew that it was KKK.
Mrs. Isaacs said she got her gun and went out to the front porch and
told them to "Get out the yard," and they said, "No. "
They were coming to get Mr. Isaacs.
So she shot over her head and they ran to the car and left.
They just kind of slithered away.
[music]
They didn't have a bunch of people to help to back them up there.
I think it's concerning and has made me think
about the two times that the store was burned down.
This enormous store was burned completely
and other places in Clayton were not burned.
My grandfather was Jewish.
and what little I could find about it,
he did try to go to synagogue in Amarillo,
Texas, at least once every three to five months.
It was not a short trip going up there.
My father did not go as much.
By the time it came to me, I didn't know what Jewish was until I was 15.
I went to a Methodist Church here.
They were in an outpost
where it was very difficult to talk about or practice Judaism.
There weren't Jews around by and large.
The Herzstein family did manage to hold the Jewish tradition together,
though, it must have been very difficult.
The Jews had been persecuted in the Old World,
and they were few and far between in the West.
But they were committed at the same time to seeing a thriving community
and thriving businesses. So they embraced the community,
They embraced the diversity, through incredible challenges.
I think it's really important to remember
that this is a positive immigration story because currently,
we're in a period where Jewish American life is being threatened.
And there are attempts from both sides of the political spectrum
to sever the Jewish connection to the United States.
[music]
When they came here to the United States, they wound up in Chicago.
My grandfather, he worked in a sweatshop.
Uncle Saul and Uncle Al, they came out west to Petaluma,
and they got chicken ranches.
It was a way to get away from the exploitation.
Jewish people are often told by the non-Jewish world what we are,
what we're allowed to be, what we shouldn't be.
I'm a Jew from Glasgow, Scotland.
I live in Hong Kong.
So there's huge diversity in the Jewish world.
But there are some historic truths such as our indigeneity to the Levant,
to the Middle East, that cannot be erased.
The Jews of the Wild West, they were able to integrate
but they also kept their Jewish identity, which is incredible,
and it's a lesson for Jewish people everywhere and also non-Jewish people,
non-Jewish migrants, non-Jewish refugees.
It is my family's experience because I am a Jew
and the Jewish people are a family.
Everybody I knew were atheists.
To me, if you're born a Jew, you die a Jew.
You can choose how you want to live.
We have Israel and Judea, the ancient Jewish kingdoms,
being invaded and colonized multiple times
and destroyed and Jewish people being dispersed
and persecuted literally in every century,
in every place that they lived, but we're still here.
It may be a small story, but it is a quintessentially Jewish story.
It's a story that says how people with grit,
determination, drive, love, humor, sweat, sometimes pain,
built a vibrant and thriving community.
And if you can do it, in the Wild West,
in the land of cowboys, you can do it anywhere.
If we consider the long history of the Jewish people,
this is something that we have done continuously.
We are people who celebrate history.
You know, our main book, the Torah, is seen as a history book.
We tell our stories over and over.
That's what I believe has kept us alive for 4,000 years and thriving.
Thank goodness, my folks came out because my uncles and,
dang, I really appreciate that.
That was our Wild West story.
[music]