Okay, so this is one of those rare movies that had me at the title. One doesn’t automatically think of Jews among the wagon trains, desperadoes and cowpunchers of the Wild West. But, in Jews of the Wild West, documentarian Amanda Kinsey brings us an anthology of impressively well-researched Jewish experiences on the Western frontier.
Kinsey starts off with a saloon girl who married an iconic gunslinger (and buried him in Colma’s Jewish cemetery) and the marketer of the clothing item most identified with the American West (hint – not Wranglers). As a Western history buff, I was familiar with those first two stories, but then I started learning a lot:
- Why many of the first mayors of frontier towns were Jewish;
- How Eastern European occupational restrictions on Jews prepared them for a pivotal role in the development of the great Denver and Greeley, Colorado, cattle stockyards;
- That most Jews found markedly less antisemitism in the West than in the East;
- That teenage Golda Meir ran away to high school in Denver.
My jaw dropped at the shocking story of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, which in 1881-84, until taken over by the reputable United Hebrew Charities, was helping new Jewish emigrants resettle in the remote West. The seeming benevolence, it turns out, was motivated by an earlier wave of now prosperous Jews who didn’t want the impoverished Orthodox arrivals from Eastern Europe to challenge capitalism and make them look bad.
Interestingly, filmmaker Kinsey, a longtime NBC News producer and five-time Emmy winner, is NOT herself Jewish.
I attended a screening of Jews of the Wild West at the San Luis Obispo Jewish Film Festival that included a Q&A with Kinsey and local historians. Jews of the Wild West is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.