Jews of the Wild West

(singing in foreign language) (melancholy music) ♪ ♪ (chaotic violin music) (Ben) The Great Train Robbery was a silent film released in 1903, considered to be the first American Western.

Broncho Billy Anderson, also known as Gilbert Anderson, born Maxwell Aronson.

He was a Jewish actor, and he played four roles.

Broncho 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 good bagels?

(dramatic music) (Ben) Interestingly, 1903 was also the year that Emma Lazarus's 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.

(guitar music) ♪ (Scott) My name is Scott Gerber, but my Jewish name is (indistinct).

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.

(Ben) The oppression that Jews had been experiencing in Europe had been taking place for over a thousand years.

So, they were leaving behind Europe, the Old World, and going to America, the New World.

(Scott) My grandfather, when he was of age to serve in the tsarist army, he had to serve or they would've 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.

(uplifting music) (Ben) 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 westward 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've represented better futures for your children.

(Rabbi Black) They'd come either through Galveston or New Orleans or New York, and they would move west when they saw the opportunity to 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."

(Scott) 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.

(Rabbi Black) And anti-Semitism 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 welcome.

(Ben) 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.

(guitar music) (Ann) 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 was 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.

(soft music) 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.

"Eh," wrong, not true.

She was from a very poor family.

(uplifting guitar music) 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.

(mellow guitar music) Wyatt was drop-dead handsome, tall and straight and serious-looking, and that bushy mustache, I mean, really, there was a reason that he became known as the Lion of Tombstone.

He was--he was just gorgeous.

I think chemistry-- 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 had been out drinking and carousing the night before.

There were a number of robberies leading up to that moment.

♪ (melancholy guitar music) You had Johnny Behan and his supporters on one side, although Johnny himself was not in the shoot-out, 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--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.

(soft music) 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 sort of 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.

(guitar music) Then, towards the end of their life, Hollywood beckoned because Hollywood was the new frontier.

So 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--on his head.

(mellow guitar music) 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.

Now 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.

♪ (male vocalist) ♪ Some came by land and some by sea to seek their fortunes and fame ♪ ♪ And one merchant man 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 Loeb Strauss in Buttenheim, which is in the Franconian region of Bavaria in Germany.

There had been this really draconian law passed called the Judenedikt, and 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, whatever.

So, it was very difficult for young Jewish men to make a living and make a life, and a lot of them begin 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.

(guitar music) ♪ Young Levi, who was still named Loeb 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.

(bluesy music) 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, you know, among the Strausses, and the brothers are saying, "You know, we need to take advantage of the opportunities in California.

You're the youngest, you're not married.

Psh, 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.

But, also, it brought so many different people from so many different cultures into California and really began what I think is one of California's greatest strengths is its diversity.

And among those were Jews who came to San Francisco and found a lot less anti-Semitism than they had experienced in New York City.

(mellow guitar music) 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, and 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 his shop and said, "Can you make a pair of pants for my husband that don't fall apart?"

(male vocalist) ♪ Pants, pants ♪ ♪ Strong, sturdy pants ♪ ♪ That's what we need to survive ♪ Jacob is making a pair of pants out of a fabric called "white duck."

Duck is kind of 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, it's pretty much the same as day one in 1873.

There were rivets on the corners of the front pockets.

And 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 three dollars, 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?"

And he includes a few examples of these pants.

On May 20th, 1873, patent number 139,121 was issued to Jacob Davis as an individual and Levi Strauss & 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.

(male vocalist) ♪ They were good and bad, hardy and brave, those rough and toughened old miners ♪ ♪ Those rough and toughened old miners ♪ (soft music) ♪ (William) 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, it 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 sort of the nagging notion that somebody ought to do something about this.

(upbeat music) Leadville, in its glory days, in the late 1870s up till about 1893, was the largest and most prosperous, wealthiest mining community in Colorado.

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.

And 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."

(soft fiddle music) Jews lived all over town, although they did tend to concentrate around the main avenue, Harrison Avenue, where the 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 were one of the highlights of the social season for the whole town.

In many ways, this was an extremely good place to be Jewish.

Moritz Mankuss was a tailor.

The family plot here, we have the Schayers.

Schayers were whiskey wholesalers.

These are the Janowitzes, also whiskey merchants.

(soft music) Jews dominated the wholesale liquor business up here.

They sold groceries.

One fellow ran a fairly large and successful laundry for a while.

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.

(guitar music) 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.

A 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, but most of the people who came out here led what we would see as 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.

(soft music) ♪ We're in a fully restored 1884 reformed 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 sort of obligation to not let this be lost.

♪ (uplifting music) ♪ (Annie) "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.

And 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.

And she was kind of traveling and writing to different towns in the West.

(guitar music) (Rabbi Mates-Muchin) 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.

(Annie) She was traveling in 1890 and ends up in Spokane, Washington, right before the high holidays.

It's right before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and she asks the community, "Where's the synagogue?

Where are services gonna be?"

And a man said, "Look, if you can get everyone together and if you will preach, we'll make sure that you have 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.

(soft music) "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.

(Rabbi Mates-Muchin) 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, it took him five years to-- from the first time that he applied for an exemption until he was able to come.

(melancholy music) The opportunities were not equal.

Chinese people were restricted from certain kinds of jobs, from living in certain places.

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.

(soft music) 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.

(Annie) When is it okay to be bold?

When is it okay to be quiet?

That's about testing boundaries.

(Rabbi Mates-Muchin) 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 story.

(Annie) "Men must learn from nature that she is the greatest of God's preachers, that sky, ocean, nations, dreck, babes, worms preached ages ago and continue to preach.

I, knowing this, feel I must, wherever and whenever I can, preach my message."

(guitar music) ♪ (Robert) Where we are is at the White Rock Overlook.

It looks down to the Rio Grande.

When I first made daguerreotypes 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.

That's a Portuguese name.

He began as a painter.

Then he took up daguerreotypy.

He was a Sephardic Jew.

He grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where there was a large Jewish community.

(soft music) Colonel John Charles Frémont 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.

Frémont helped enable that sort of thing.

In 1853, Frémont 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.

(piano music) 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 his equipment being borne on three mules, weighing 150 pounds, and having to unpack it, make the exposures, pack it up again, and, as a result, being well behind the expedition on the trail.

(guitar music) We don't have any but one of his original daguerreotypes.

One of the pictures shows three or four tepees 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 daguerreotypes.

It's 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, Frémont's route.

I made daguerreotypes first where--when I could find where the source of the engravings were, which I found all of them in the end.

All right, 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.

(soft music) 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 the town of Parowan in the Great Basin.

It was a Mormon settlement just four years old.

He becomes an acquaintance of Brigham Young, who was 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.

He describes his astonishment of the magnificent views.

One of his favorite words was "sublime" which really, in the 19th century, meant a combination of beauty and terror.

(chanting) (drum pounding) (Fred) It was 1882 when the first railroad came through, and the old men used to tell stories about how the old people would lie 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."

(guitar music) Acoma is situated west of Albuquerque, about 70 miles.

The railroad made a huge difference.

It expanded their economy, too.

The Acoma women, you know, they're well-known for their pottery, and they started marketing their pottery at the railroad tracks.

(Shayai) 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.

(Fred) 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 Ako, referred to Acomas as Akome or Acometra.

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 6,000 to 7,000 people that lived on the mesa.

They lived in structures that were three to four stories high, kind of like New York City on a smaller scale.

The Spanish killed a lot of Acoma people on the mesa.

They took it by force.

Some 700 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 smallpox, other infections.

By the mid-1850s, I believe, their population was only around 350, 360 at the most maybe at that time.

(somber guitar music) ♪ ♪ (bluesy 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 the mercantile business.

He started trading with the Acoma, not only the Acoma, but also with the other tribes close by, the Laguna people and as well as the U.S. Cavalry.

He was a good friend of the Acoma, and he learned the language even.

He was the least proficient in English.

But he could speak Acoma and Spanish well.

The Acoma started calling him Don, Don Solomono.

(mellow guitar music) ♪ 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 a governor for several years.

He became friends with Solomon through trade, and Solomon was introduced to Juana.

(Shayai) If he had a trading post here, then they probably would've struck up a conversation and just talked.

(Fred) 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, a 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.

The 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.

(Shayai) Our people are matriarchal, so it doesn't surprise me at all that she stepped into this role to help her husband.

(Fred) 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 Acomas in keeping their lands intact, 'cause at the time, there was a lot of homesteaders that were coming out on the Indian lands just settling wherever.

He was trying to safeguard their lands.

The president of the 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 these 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 Acomas treated Don Solomono.

Sanchez's thought was it was a scam.

He was always calling him "the rich Jew."

The gentlemen 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 lands, 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.

(Shayai) We live and breathe our Native American culture every day.

We take that strength and resilience and apply it to everything we do.

You had the Spanish government, then the Mexican government, then the U.S. government, and all these different governments have come in to try to take our lands.

If you have somebody who comes in who's an outsider wanting to protect the land, then, of course, you're going to hold them in a deep respect.

(Fred) When I go up to the old place, it's kind of a nostalgic feeling.

Sometimes, we pull over and just look out throughout the valley and think about the ancestors.

(melancholy music) ♪ (Norman) 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.

♪ "You shouldn't believe that.

This is what you should believe."

Um, and a lot of it 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 independent.

Born 1898, end of the 19th century into the beginning of the 20th century, she was living in then Russia.

She witnessed what political violence can do to a country.

Because of her Jewish religion, culture, she was a target with her family.

The first memories of many, many Jews, the first thing they remember, like I, is when my father and the upstairs neighbor were nailing up the doors because the rumors were that there's going to be another pogrom in Kiev.

(Norman) It was a lasting impact on her, a lasting impact.

(orchestral 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 at school and sees that kids have to buy their textbooks.

Free school, not free textbooks.

She starts a group, a committee with a good friend, who were 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 into 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 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.

'Cause she knows if she says, "Can I go to Denver," it's not gonna 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 is a fairly new building when she lived here with her sister.

So if you look, there's just a couple of rooms, and it was husband, wife, young daughter, and Golda.

And 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 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 is her education, and that's why she was life-long, never varied from this.

Socialist Zionist was her belief system.

And that system always has an element of flexibility, 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're siding with the authoritarians, the dictators.

We're the people who believe what you believe," and 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, it's really where her education in many ways began, those late nights, sitting by, washing teacups from people who had tuberculosis.

(bright music) (Ed) They must have talked to one another to pick this place, because we all came here.

(Richard) Well, they originally went to New York.

They spent several years in New York and then moved here.

(Ed) Well, he said tuberculosis was one of the reasons.

(Albert) My father, Louis Dinner, and mother came from Vilna Gubernia, which is the southernmost province of the Ukraine.

They had half brothers, my dad did, that came over earlier and were located in Denver and Greeley, Colorado.

(Richard) They left Europe because, I'm sure, of the pogroms.

(Albert) It seems like a billion people came out of that little county.

(Ed) Our great-grandfather was a dairy farmer.

(Richard) Louis Robinson came to New York in probably 1883 and then to Colorado.

Hard to raise cows on Fifth Avenue.

(Albert) 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 peddle 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 an orthodox synagogue.

It was a mechitzah type synagogue.

He bought some real estate and started dealing in cattle.

They would buy cattle and they would bring 'em back into the corrals, feed 'em over the winter, and sell 'em at the stockyards.

He and the 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.

It's still one of the major stockyards in the country.

(Ed) They called us a cow town.

(Richard) We were called a cow town.

(Albert) His great-grandfather, Lazar, was a dear friend of my father.

Lazar came up with his black horse and black suit and bolo hat and stopped and said: (speaking in Yiddish) Which, to the uninitiated, is, "How are you doing, young man?"

(Richard) I used to remember, as a kid, when I'd see him, he'd kiss me, and that beard just-- his beard was something else.

He spoke very little English, he was well thought of, he was a very respected cattle buyer.

(Albert) Imagine seeing Fiddler on the Roof with cowboy boots.

Everybody looked up to him.

To haul a whole load or so from the railhead, which was the dominant source of transportation to the feed lot, we would have to drive 'em by horse from the railhead to the feed lot.

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.

(exclaiming) The first cattle trip I was set 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 load of cattle from Hawaii even.

(Ed) "The solitary man pulls on his long beard and looks upon this scene so wonderful and unexpected."

Should I do it again?

(Richard) Let me see this.

(Ed) I couldn't see the periods.

(Richard) "Here stands this pioneer out of the heart of the Great American West.

And he looks upon his herd 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.

(Albert) 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.

(soft music) (Annie) 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.

♪ (Annie) 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 gonna assimilate."

♪ (Jeanne) 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.

(Annie) If they're living on Hester Street in the Tenement District, they're all gonna become radicals living in concentrated areas, speaking Yiddish, working in the garments trades, protesting this, that, and they also might make Jews as a class look bad.

Jacob Schiff was a German-Jewish financier, a banker, who becomes a really prominent Jewish leader.

And so he lives uptown, he's a reformed Jew.

He becomes very involved, so 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 gonna 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, you know, "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."

And others writing, "The ground should open up and swallow you for all the duress, 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?"

(Jeanne) 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 prominent resident, was Emanuel 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.

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.

(Jeanne) 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 rudely 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, and then the second year they planted early and then they got an early spring snowstorm.

(Jeanne) 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 this 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 hopeful.

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.

(Annie) 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 John Coya, and this is a song, like, under the czar 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 work in the land after centuries and centuries.

And this is John Coya.

I'll do it first in Yiddish, and then I'll do it in English.

(acoustic guitar music) ♪ (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) ♪ ♪ (woodwind music) (Stacia) Abraham Jacob Zlabuvsky 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.

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 the American side is Abraham.

Abraham started a meat market, and Abraham, he sold matzos on Pesach in the synagogue.

(Stacia) 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 years after his dad.

(Bernard) 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 it 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.

So that was his clientele.

(mellow guitar music) ♪ ♪ He sold 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.

(Stacia) I heard that Frank sold Pancho Villa pants, and I am going to stick with that.

I don't know what size they were or beige, maybe they were beige, I don't know.

(laughing) (Bernard) 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 witnessed this.

(Stacia) I think life was very precarious at the time.

You come to Texas in the late 1800s, early 1900s, like, you have to have a tenacious personality or you're just gonna get crushed by it.

I like to imagine Frank then was like kind of a little, skinny, Jewish rough rider kind of guy, like, out there scrapping for what he wants and fighting for what he thought was right and taking down the bad guys.

(Bernard) 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 of my brother and I have shaps on.

He used to buy us uniforms, and when we would come to visit him, we were only this tall.

(Stacia) Saul didn't come with the rest of the family.

He had been in the czar's army, and so after he served, he came to America.

(Bernard) This is Saul writing to Abraham, his father.

"How long ago was it?

And yet not that long at all when I used to get up at 5 a.m. 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?

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 kind of immigrant group.

(Stacia) These were people who came out and, like, were headstrong and forged their own identity in a whole new place.

(mellow music) ♪ (Gail) 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.

(Emma) Rachel Kobey was my great-great-great grandmother and 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 and it was hard for Jewish families in Russia at that time.

(Emma) Rachel had two uncles that came to America before she did in Colorado, and they were able to bring over Rachel and Isaac.

(soft music) (Dana) I can't imagine how hard it would've been to leave everything and just step into the unknown.

(Emma) 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.

(Gail) Jesse Shwayder was born in Black Hawk in the 1800s.

♪ (Emma) 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 family, and 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.

Yeah, there's wood and leather and metal and studs and, yeah, I mean, it's beautiful!

I don't know how old this trunk is, but it is really old.

(Emma) This is all Emmet's stuff.

Emmet 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.

Samsonite becomes famous for luggage that's easy to carry around and made of lightweight materials, which was 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."

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."

(Emma) 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 Emmet get a lot of the credit, but it was really Rachel.

This one's Rachel and her kids.

-Some of the kids.

-Some of the kids.

(Gail) You could see why they thought she was a force of nature.

(Emma) Yeah.

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 success.

(soft guitar music) (Richard) We're Isaacs Hardware in Clayton, New Mexico.

(man) I was looking for a new charger for my drills, -my Cobalt drills.

-All right, -let's go see what I've got.

-Okay.

(Richard) Robert Wolfe 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, from what 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, Thielen.

He moved West to 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.

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, and in this newspaper, there are two one-page ads from M. Herzstein and Company announcing Fire, Fire, Fire, Fire.

(upbeat 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 salespersons 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," and he was very proud of that.

I think Mr. Isaacs and Mr. Herzstein were pretty good friends.

This is missus.

My mother-in-law was much older, this is just where she got married.

(soft 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.

These men in white gowns jumped out, and she knew they was KKK.

Mrs. Isaacs said she got her gun and went out on the front porch, told 'em to get out of the yard and they said no.

They were coming to get Mr. Isaacs.

So she shot him in the head and they ran and jumped in the car and left.

They just kind of slithered away.

♪ ♪ They didn't have a bunch of people to help to back 'em up then.

♪ (Jessica) 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 Methodist church here.

(Jessica) 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've 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.

(Scott) When they came here to the United States, they wound up in Chicago.

My grandfather worked in a sweatshop.

Uncle Saul and Uncle Al, they came out West to Petaluma and they got chicken ranches.

It was kind of a way to get away from the exploitation.

(Ben) 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'm a Jew, and the Jewish people are a family.

(Scott) You know, everybody I knew here 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 Judah, 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.

(Ben) If we consider the long history of the Jewish people, this is something that we have done continuously.

(Rabbi Black) 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.

(Scott) Thank goodness my folks came out, because my uncles and-- dang, I really appreciate that, and that was our Wild West story.

(mellow music) ♪ ♪ (bright music)