SOURCE: "Jacob Riis and the Jews: The Ambivalent Quest for Community," in American Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1979, pp. 5-24.

In the following essay, Fried examines Riis's interest in, and study of, eastern European Jews.

There have been few figures in American immigrant history who more tirelessly expounded upon the nature of Americanization than Jacob Riis. Against the steady growth of a disenchanting critical realism assessing the costs of estrangement in American life, Riis continually pointed out how the immigrant's past could comport well with his present. Riis' very achievements—and they surely were no mean ones—led him as well as such differing figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln Steffens, and Jane Robbins to see his life invested with a culturally significant form, one worthy of emulation.1 As James Lane, Riis' most recent and astute biographer, has suggested, his importance can be traced to his bridging "the gap between...