A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America

Abstract

Kirsten Fermaglich's insightful book explores the seemingly ordinary phenomenon of Jewish name changing to shed light on broad themes of racial and ethnic identity, and the complicated ways that Americans—and particularly American Jews—negotiated the markers of distinctiveness and racial “otherness” with the goals of integration and access. Fermaglich debunks the commonly held assumption that most immigrants had their names changed unwillingly by officials at Ellis Island. To the contrary, she finds that Jewish name changing peaked in the 1930s and 1940s, initiated primarily by the children of immigrants in an effort to elude anti-Semitism and to overcome barriers to upward mobility, whether by...

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