In Poland, however, to take the largest
Jewish population center, although there was a Jewish middle class, the per capita income of Jews in the 1930s was less than $ 100 per year, and a quarter of Poland's Jews were kept from starvation only by charity from America.
Back in the period I am talking about, the 1930s and 1940s, Jews living in the major
population centers of American
Jewish life — New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and so on — might at least in some part of their daily lives have experienced a sense of cultural dominance: in their neighborhoods, on their blocks, most people lived as they did, and spoke as they did, and viewed the world as they did.