Zionist on 34th Street

In Resurrecting Hebrew (2008), a book that tells the story of the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, Ilan Stavans gave an impromptu test to a woman jogging by him in Tel Aviv. Who was Ben Yehuda, he asked. “Her initial response was a smile, followed by a silence, behind which I detected hesitation. ‘Ben Yehuda? It’s a street,’ she replied.” When Stavans asked who it was named after, her answer was simple: “How should I know? Am I an encyclopedia?”

I wonder what would happen if one were to pose a similar question to a random passerby in nearby Netanya: Who is the city named after? My guess is that only a small proportion of the city’s quarter of a million residents know that the answer is an American Jew named Nathan Straus. But I’d still bet that there are more people in Netanya who recognize that name than there are in the entire United States.

In 1931, Nathan Straus’s obituary in The New York Times identified him as a “world-­famous philanthropist, benefactor of the sick and the poor in many lands, champion of Zionism and dean [­senior leader] of American Jewry.” Eight years earlier, a “newspaper survey of New Yorkers named him the citizen who had done the most for the city over the previous twenty-­five years.” Apart from a couple of playgrounds in Manhattan, however, there are no longstanding monuments to him. But now we finally have a biography that gives the man his due, Andrew Fisher’s Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian.

Nathan Straus was born in Germany in 1848, but he wasn’t one of those bold spirits who arrived in America with empty pockets, strapped a pack on his back, and headed into the hinterland to peddle. It was his father, Lazarus Straus who did that, in 1852—not as an archetypal teenage immigrant but as a man in his forties, politically demoralized after the failure of the 1848 revolution and financially constricted. But he also had a good education and a good business reputation that gave him access to credit (and a well-laden wagon, from the start). Within two years Lazarus had become co-owner of a store in a tiny town in Georgia and had sent for his wife and four children.

Nathan helped mind the store from an early age, together with his brothers. They were the only Jews in town, but they obtained the rudiments of a Jewish education from their father, who was Hebraically knowledgeable, and from the local Protestant ministers, who were benevolent and ecumenical. During the Civil War, Lazarus relocated to Columbus, Georgia, where he established a new and—under the circumstances—successful store, but the destruction of the South’s economy left him feeling that he ought to start over again—in New York.

There he rebounded quickly, despite his very limited capital, with the aid of his young sons Isidor and Nathan. The key breakthrough occurred in 1874, when Nathan engineered a partnership between L. Straus & Sons and a moderate-sized dry goods store on West 14th Street by the name of R. H. Macy’s. Two decades later, Macy’s workforce had risen from a couple of hundred to approximately three thousand, and the two brothers had become the store’s full owners—not to mention the fact that they became at the same time half-owners of Brooklyn’s largest department store, Abraham & Straus.

Fisher devotes only one chapter of his book to “Retailing in Gilded Age New York,” but I’m not going to complain about that. Nathan was much more interesting, to me at least, as a philanthropist and as a public man, though he was not so much of one as his older brother, Isidor, who briefly represented New York in Congress, and his kid brother, Oscar, who served as Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce and Labor (becoming the first Jewish cabinet officer in US history) and the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Nathan held public office for only two months, in early 1898, when he served as Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Health. But his philanthropy spanned decades. It began in the early 1890s, when he dedicated himself to providing pasteurized, purified milk below cost to poor families with babies and young children. Straus “pi­loted the model in Lower Manhattan, particularly in and near low-­income neighborhoods,” and then went on to create “a Manhattan-wide network of milk stations and, over the next decades, helped seed safe milk services throughout much of the United States, Western Europe, and Palestine.” Straus, according to Fisher, “arguably became the one person most responsible for teaching Western nations about the life-­ saving importance of milk pasteurization and persuading them to enforce high safety standards for milk production and distribution. It was a historic achievement—­and one too little remembered ­today.”

But we wouldn’t be remembering him here and now for his business acumen or his devotion to the public welfare, if he hadn’t also become, after his retirement from Macy’s, such a great benefactor of the Jewish people. Those who imagine that the German Jewish grandees of New York, the much derided “uptown Jews,” had nothing but scorn for their Jewish brethren from and in the East would be surprised to learn how ferociously an aging businessman like Nathan threw himself into the Joint Distribution Committee’s efforts to come to their aid in 1914 after war began to churn up their heartland. At a meeting in, of all places, the Madison Avenue home of J. P. Morgan’s daughter, “Straus reacted angrily to the announcement that the war relief campaign of a large ­women’s ­organization had fallen short of its fund­ rais­ing goals. Noting that he himself had raised relief dollars for Eastern Europe and Palestine by selling his race­ horses, yacht, and summer home in the Thousand Islands,” he tongue-lashed the rich. “If a man gives $250,000 for a picture, “he ­proclaimed, “he ought to give just as much [in war relief charity].” He himself, in the course of the war, contributed twice that sum—which was an awful lot of money in those days.

Straus’s concern with Palestine antedated the war by a decade. He fell in love with it during his first trip there in 1904, and, unusually for a man of his class, became a passionate Zionist. By 1912, the Yishuv was becoming the principal focus of his philanthropy. When the Yishuv was in grave financial danger in October 1914, for instance, he contributed a quarter of the funds to supply a US Navy ship with relief supplies. “In Jerusalem’s Old City, he established the first of what would eventually be two Straus soup kitchens. It initially fed more than 300 people per day, with this number more than doubling in the first months of the Great War and exceeding 1,000 by the war’s end.” Straus also focused on helping people to help themselves. Prior to the war he established a number of workshops in which artisans were trained to produce “Holy Land keepsakes.” This business suffered during the war but roared back when it was over.

“By far,” Fisher informs us, “Straus’s largest and most impactful effort in Palestine was in public health.” Before the war he set up a Straus Health Department in Jerusalem to fight infectious diseases, from malaria to trachoma and rabies. In 1920, he contributed $100,000 to set up a medical research program at the newly established Hebrew University. Even more significantly, he made massive contributions to Haddasah from the time that Judah Magnes introduced him to its founder, Henrietta Szold, to his own death, in 1931. This included $250,000 to set up the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Center in Jerusalem. What did this mean to Straus, Fisher asks. “Enough to stir a frail seventy-­nine-year-­old to voyage nearly 6,000 miles for its cornerstone-laying ceremony in March 1927 and then gush—to long applause—­ that the occasion represented ‘the happiest moment in [his] life.’”

Nathan is the second of Lazarus’s three sons to be the subject of a biography. Naomi Cohen wrote one of Oscar in 1969. Of Isidor, I would venture to guess, there will never be one, but he will nonetheless remain the best remembered of the three, a man whose noble death together with his wife on the Titanic has become the stuff of legend—and more than one film.