For many German-speaking Jews who fled Hitler’s Europe for America, Aufbau was their forum for debate, their mouthpiece. The New York-based weekly newspaper carried articles by many distinguished contributors—including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig and Max Brod—and recorded the divided sensibilities of its readers. Aufbau called for Americanization as well as the preservation of Old World culture and worried about assimilation vs. Zionism. As Peter Schrag writes in his illuminating study on a largely forgotten piece of American immigrant history, Aufbau’s readers were diverse in background, a “community of fate” as Schrag writes. Perhaps they were not entirely unlike the migrants of today, united in desperation and pressing against the barriers of an immigration system that didn’t want them.
