The Jewish Consumptive Question: How Fin de Siècle and Interwar Geopolitics Fueled a Sanatoria Rivalry in Denver and Vice Versa
By: Lulu Joanis
Between 1913 and 1914, Golda Meir, eventual Zionist pioneer and Prime Minister of teenage Israel, developed her political consciousness in Denver, Colorado. Meir’s sister, Shayna Korngold, had migrated from the Russian Empire to Colorado as part of a tuberculosis treatment commonly recommended by the doctors of the day. Korngold stayed at two Denver sanatoria—first at the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives (NJHC) and then at the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (JCRS). After her recovery from consumption, Korngold decided to settle down in Denver, alongside thousands of fellow immigrant Jews returned to health. Colorado’s geography facilitated a health boosterism industry that appealed not only to tuberculars but also their families. Meir had, by this time, run away from Milwaukee, where her parents lived, and stayed with her sister in Denver to avoid the patriarchal household in Wisconsin that arranged for her to marry a man twice her senior. As Meir later acknowledged in her memoir, she grew acquainted in Denver with nascent radical discourses of Jewish identity, Zionism, socialism, and anarchism. Colorado’s Jewish tubercular immigrant history points to Denver as a fertile site for these conversations. Meir had come to Labor Zionist consciousness in large part by listening in on discussions that transpired between the Jewish patients of the two competing and overlapping Jewish sanatoria. Korngold gathered her social circle from her stays in the NJHC and the JCRS. In both sanatoria, and then at home, she surrounded herself with multiple strands of Jewish political and ethnoreligious thought, which influenced Meir and, with her, the founding of Israel. In this way, Denver played a seminal role in Zionism’s development.[1] The city’s pioneer mythos inspired the pioneer mythos of Meir and, by extension, other Labor Zionists.
The two Jewish sanatoria of Denver vied for medical and ethnoreligious legitimacy, which often put these institutions at odds. In 1899, the NJHC opened its doors to its first patients. Formally nonsectarian and free of cost, the Hospital functioned as a treatment center for any consumptive who attained the required paperwork, accepted Reform Jewish influences, followed certain expectations of middle-class Americanist acculturation, and had not reached the “emergency” or “advanced stages” of the disease. Then, in 1904, twenty advanced-stage consumptives—most in poverty, all working class, and all barred from being treated at the NJHC—banded together to create the rival JCRS, branding itself as a necessary supplement to the NJHC. The JCRS positioned itself as a home for consumptives of any stage as well as any class, and embodied a homegrown style of care with a kosher kitchen and an overt engagement with Yiddish language and culture. The JCRS also sought out grassroots funds from the working populace instead of relying on the donations of wealthy philanthropic institutions (the latter being the strategy of the NJHC).[2]
Both the NJHC and the JCRS drove Ashkenazi Jewish emigration to Denver, which entangled local medical and philanthropic discourses with those of Jewish (inter)national belonging.[3] Tensions between the two Jewish sanatoria of Denver mirrored those then felt across the diaspora and in the budding Jewish nation-state. Intra-Jewish tensions touched on multiple aspects of ethnoreligious identity, including secularism and Americanization, pressures that continued to build while the “Jewish Question” was debated, with increasing urgency and fervor, across the world leading up to, and continuing throughout, the first half of the twentieth century.[4] The NJHC and JCRS operated as rivals, sometimes friendly, other times hostile, and functioned as a pair of contact zones, with global Jewish discourses fueling local sanatorium discourses and vice versa. How did the spectra of Jewish identity nascent to the fin de siècle and the interwar period—adjacency to Zionism, engagement with Yiddish culture and language, practice of Orthodoxy, and belief in national philanthropy—bear upon Denver’s public health concerns to fuel competition between two Jewish-run sanatoria? And how did publications from and about Jewish sanatoria influence the wider Jewish nationalist reckoning of these periods?
The Korngold House—now better known as the Golda Meir House and found on 9th St. at Auraria Campus—can be thought of as the third contact zone. The linguist Mary Louise Pratt coined “contact zones… to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other.”[5] In spite of the “social differences [that] might be in play, it is assumed that all participants are engaged in the same [discursive] game,” which, she acknowledges, often is the case, though “it often is not, as, for example, when speakers are from different classes or cultures, or one party is exercising authority and another is submitting to it or questioning it.”[6] Both qualities apply to the sanatoria, the main difference being between working-class Yiddish Orthodox immigrants from the Russian Empire and their middle-class Americanized German Reform counterparts, and the secondary difference being between medical professional and patient. The Korngold House also aligns with Pratt’s description of the classroom as a specific sort of contact zone, wherein “[e]verybody had a stake in everything [they] read, but the… stakes varied.”[7] In this case, everybody associated with Denver’s Jewish sanatoria held a stake in the discourses related to Jewish identity and participated in discursive community. Both the underlying camaraderie and the discursive relationship between these two camps mean that these contact zones align as well with her qualification of “safe houses,” which she describes as “[s]ocial and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves [into] sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, [and] temporary protection from legacies of oppression.” As Pratt states, “[w]here there are legacies of subordination, groups need places for healing and mutual recognition”—in this case, consumptive Jews needed “safe houses in which to construct shared understandings [and] claims on the world that they c[ould] then bring into the contact zone.”[8] The NJHC, the JCRS, and the Korngold house functioned as contact zones and safe houses. Ideas that, through various Jewish figures, influenced the creation of Israel and the tenor of its politics became incubated, calcified, or thrown into stark relief at the NJHC, the JCRS, and the Korngold House where established Jewish social connections continued post-treatment with more social volition.
The two sanatoria participated in an adversarial but ultimately symbiotic relationship, pushing and pulling one another to be more in line with a shifting but gradually building consensus of Jewish ideals. These philosophical rifts played out across and within their mouthpieces; the Sanatorium was a moderately Zionist newsletter affiliated with the JCRS, and the Jewish Outlook wasthe non-Zionist rag of the NJHC. Just as the NJHC preceded the JCRS, so, too, did the NJHC Outlook precede the JCRS Sanatorium.Analysis of the discourses that occurred across the Sanatorium and the Jewish Outlook illustrates how each of these institutions held idiosyncratic permutations of sociopolitical convictions and medical practices. Local, national, and global discourses that dealt with Jewish autonomy, survival, community, language, nationalism, halakha (Jewish law), and medical science melded with public health concerns, and these discourses fueled frictions between the Jewish sanatoria. In other words, the conflicts expressed in their organizational mouthpieces impacted the courses of Jewish thought and of general consumptive care. The rifts that formed between the two institutions often fell along the fault lines of ideology, national affiliation, language, and denomination.
Historiography
Studies into the sanatorium movement in Colorado, the ethical ideals associated with Jews, and the discourses surrounding Jewish nationalism have all maintained relevance up to the present day. But Jews after the foundation of Israel have had to concern themselves with how to relate their Jewishness to a newly established and rightfully controversial ethnostate. Academics have followed some of these footsteps; my historical engagement builds upon this foundation, though the specific role of Denver’s sanatorium movement in the formulation of Zionism has yet to be explored until now. This overlapping subfield warrants exploration in light of concerns about Jewish people’s ideal relationship to Israel, given the state’s historical and recent conduct towards the Arab population, journalists, nurses, hostages, Yiddish speakers, and others. The Jewish Question of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has made way for the Zionist Question of the twenty-first century. These are, of course, two distinct questions and concerns, despite the din of Zionist claims to essential semitism leading people to believe otherwise (anti-Zionist and antisemite being more or less the same thing in their frankly incorrect formulation). My research (that of a Jew) shows that just as the Jews of today have been forced to confront accusations of split loyalties, so too had the Jews of yesterday. Since then, the Covid-19 pandemic has markedly increased xenophobic expression, including the antisemitic sort, and revived antisemitism’s connections to public health concerns that continue into the present day, which mirrors the ways that the Jews of the fin de siècle and the interwar period had to cope with and respond to tuberculosis being labelled an essentially Jewish disease and Jews being smeared as carriers of the disease.[9]
A legal expert writing on halakha, Gabriel Slamovits, places the NJHC in the context of the fin de siècle discourse about whether Jewish institutions could utilize Jewish cadavers for scientific research—in this case, the “cure” to tuberculosis. The NJHC had garnered a Rabbinic sanction for this purpose, but not before encountering fierce opposition from a local radical Jewish anti-autopsy group called Yaqra de-Shikhvi (anglicized Hebrew for ‘honor of the dead’). When the NJHC requested the sanction, two prominent New York rabbis took opposing positions on the matter. Rabbi A. Yudelowitz ultimately granted the NJHC the sanction to autopsy Jewish cadavers for medical research. Rabbi E. Preil, on the other hand, argued staunchly between 1908 and 1909 against autopsying Jews under any and all circumstances. While I appreciate Slamovits’s insights into halakhic discourses on autopsy, he defined the NJHC erroneously as an “Orthodox-run” institution.[10] The NJHC was founded by William S. Friedman, a German American rabbi of the Temple Emmanuel, a Reform synagogue in Denver. The institution’s mouthpiece, the Jewish Outlook, took an explicitstance against Orthodoxy many times throughout its publication run. The anti-Orthodox position responded to the steady surge of emigrants, mainly underprivileged Russian Jews of an Orthodox Jewish persuasion, to Denver throughout the fin de siècle and interwar periods. German American Jews of the middle class and Reform Jewish persuasion, like Friedman, often set themselves apart from their Russian-Jewish, Yiddish-speaking, and lower-class counterparts for the sake of acculturated American respectability.
Jewish scholars Farber and Greenberg have also written extensively about Rabbinic discourses regarding the Jewish body after death which pertained to the NJHC. New York Rabbi Dr. Mosessohn wrote critically of the Yaqra de-Shikhvi that “the bodies of the dead are more important to them than the survival of the patients” and defended the NJHC’s performance of autopsy as necessary to alleviate the suffering of the living.[11] Rabbi Yudelovitch, also from New York, sided with R’ Mosessohn, and anticipated and rebutted the common anti-autopsy argument made by rabbis, that souls feel “agony over the dissection of their bodies,” by arguing that his fellow sages “have no power to decide the law. One could speculate the opposite as well: that their souls are elated about the fact that their bodies have been chopped up to search within them [for a cure] as a benefit to the living, thus saving the lives of the ill.”[12] The Yaqra de-Shikhvi, for their part, sought out Rabbi Album of Chicago, who supported their cause, representing autopsy as unethical, un-halakhic, unsavory, and ineffective.[13] The aforementioned Rabbi Preil participated further in this discourse, spread via rabbinic pamphlets, in an essay that played on the name of the Yaqra de-Shikhvi, called “Yaqra de Ḥayyei” (“the honor of the living”). In it, he called for a strict interpretation of the Talmud, putting autopsy at odds with halakha, though this reductive perspective drew ire from fellow rabbis.[14] Rabbis Hirschensohn and Levine, for example, argued positions of compromise, the former critiquing his anti-autopsy peers while avoiding outright encouraging autopsy of Jewish cadavers, the latter suggesting to allow Jewish consumptive patients to decide for themselves, while they live, whether their body shall be dissected after they die for the possible benefit of the living.[15] A medical doctor and the son of a rabbi, Dr. Illoway, cited a story in the Talmud, of a living baby being cut out of a mother who died in childbirth to save the former’s life, in order to justify his support for autopsy and his frustration at anti-autopsy rabbis. He argued, on the one hand, that Talmudic wisdom should not be the sole arbiter for this discussion about medical practice and, on the other hand, called for a constantly updating rabbinic dialogue that keeps up with modern science, in order to serve the needs of modern Jews effectively.[16] Dr. Illoway earned the respect of R’ Messas, Chief Rabbi of Morocco, who argued in his favor, even calling him “Rabbi” Illoway in a rare gesture for a bona fide rabbi to bestow to a layperson.[17] Overall, the tenor of rabbinic arguments about the NJHC’s practices mirrors that of the arguments between it and its rival sanatorium—occcasional blows as well as respect. Farber and Greenberg reveal a continuity of discourse about Jews concerned about where they belong in the medical field, even after death.
Another historian, Jeanne Abrams, a prominent expert of Denver’s Jewish sanatoria, claims in her biography of Dr. C. D. Spivak, a founder of the JCRS, that America’s tuberculosis sanatorium movement “was one of the first successful examples of a national public health campaign.”[18] While recent statistical research has since disputed the sanatoria’s efficacy, what cannot be disputed is that tuberculosis carried the connotation of being “the Jewish disease”—and this connotation persisted even as doctors and the public accepted germ theory.[19] Although Eastern European Jews were statistically less likely on average to contract tuberculosis, existing xenophobic, antisemitic, and classist sentiments often maligned Jews, especially working-class Eastern European Orthodox Jews, as in some way responsible for the disease’s prevalence. This explains the ethnoreligious inclusion and distinction of Jewish sanatoria in Denver; by publicly abating the problem of consumption, Jews worked to absolve themselves of blame for tuberculosis.
Abrams argues that the Southwest region of the United States afforded Jews relative distance from antisemitism. Abrams calls Spivak’s role as the leader of an “ethnic-based” medical institution “a rather unique blend of Yiddish[ness], socialism, and secularism.”[20] She refers to the Jewish sanatoria as “transient base[s]” of political discourse among the radical Jewish intelligentsia who found themselves there.[21] She characterizes Dr. Spivak as a mediator for the many JCRS immigrant patients who sought to nurture the attachment to Orthodox Jewish culture that they brought with them from the Russian Empire, rather than distancing themselves from familiarity in a place of ostensible healing.[22] Moreover, Abrams connects the contributors to the Jewish Outlook to another historian, Jonathan Sarna, and his concept of a “Jewish ‘Great Awakening.’” This was “characterized by a return to religion, a heightened sense” of Jewish personhood (especially womanhood), and “a renewed community-wide emphasis on education and culture.”[23] Pluralist Americanism provided an alternative to Zionism, as thousands of Jewish people found that the American Southwest had become a stable site for myriad forms of Jewish life.[24]
Literature professor Ernest Gilman considers the tubercular community to be a literary one. Sanatoria workers thought of writing as a healthful exercise, and explicitly encouraged patients to write. This led both of Denver’s Jewish sanatoria to publish secondary periodicals that focused on patient submissions.[25] Gilman’s literary analysis adds a layer of significance to Jews’ simultaneous participation in medical and radical discourses.
From 1890 to 1920, the “invalid” population (mostly consumptives) surged in Denver from a third of the municipal population (30,000 “lungers” as they were called) to forty percent (100,000). Historian Gregg Mitman explains this by connecting the searches for wealth in the form of gold and health in the form of curative climate to what he calls the “geography of hope” boasted by the Rocky Mountain boosters of the fin de siècle and after. Of this economy of hope, most considered the health wing the nobler calling, but seekers of wealth and of health alike shared the same risk—coming home with less of either than they started with. “Health prospectors” sold the idea that God “bestowed upon Colorado a nature bountiful in health,” a Garden of Eden or utopia not dissimilar to Zion as Zionists sought to create in Palestine. Jewish sanatoria patients and professionals debated the evergreen themes of nationalism and the “search for a better place.”[26] Zionism branded itself in pioneering terms—a movement of Jews ‘returning’ to a land to ‘tame’ it and build ‘civilization’ in its stead.[27] The American Southwest in general relied on similar branding in its age of boosterism.
Historical Context—Jews in Denver Before the Fin de Siècle
Frances Wisebart Jacobs gained national renown in the fin de siècle United States from fellow Jews and Gentiles alike for her philanthropy and her support of workers’ and women’s rights. In many ways (like as a leader of both the Hebrew Ladies’ Aid Society and Hebrew Ladies’ Benevolent Society), Jacobs set the stage for the NJHC to thrive in Denver. She founded the city’s Charity Organization Society (later called the Denver Community Chest), and its philanthropy often overlapped with that of the NJHC and the JCRS. Her disillusionment with the federation of charitable organizations and with the power of the individual charities themselves inspired her to set the NJHC into motion. Jacobs can also be thought of as the inflection point between the consumption-averse press from before the new millennium, of journalists unwilling to write about a taboo topic, and the discreet sanatoria presses from after the fin de siècle. Jacobs publicized and resensitized the issue of the urban consumptive poor.[28] After Jacobs passed away in 1892, over two thousand people gathered at Temple Emmanuel for her funeral. Within a few years, other Jewish community leaders like Rabbi Friedman and Seraphine Pisko would carry the torch further.[29]
By the turn of the century, Seraphine Pisko, in her capacity as paid fundraiser and contributor to the Jewish Outlook, began to espouse and advocate for what she called “ideal Americanism,” which her professional relationship with Ray Morris David elucidates further. Pisko and David embarked on similar and overlapping life-paths; they had both moved to Colorado with family as teenagers, married Colorado businessmen and, within a few years, became widowed. Both women went on to be highly involved and esteemed in social work on behalf of Denver’s poor people, especially poor Jews. These women became known as well in aristocratic social life, which garnered them access to sociopolitical legitimacy. Much of their professional drive to work in relief in Denver owes to their awareness of the overwhelming victimization of Jews in Europe and the nascent discourses about Jewish nationalism. So, too, did their American patriotism come from an awareness of the fever pitch of antisemitism in Europe and the comparative calm of Colorado. For the middle-class, German, Reform Jewish community in Denver, this sense of stability would be threatened by the succeeding influx of working-class, Russian, Orthodox Jewish immigrants.[30]
The Jewish Outlook (NJHC)and Sanatorium (JCRS)
On the front page of the August 12, 1904 edition of the Jewish Outlook—published in the founding year of the JCRS, though the Sanatorium had yet to be serialized—Dr. Maurice Fishberg, affiliated with the NJHC, represented the “Life of Consumptives in Denver Boarding Houses” as one with an informal entry fee of $7-$10 per week. Fishberg only encouraged the prepared immigrant to emigrate. He warned aspiring American Jews that peddlers, of a common Jewish profession, did not profit in Colorado, and neither did tailors; the latter option he especially discouraged consumptives from undertaking, due to the risks of such labor on their condition. Boarding house life, as attainable and communitarian as it seemed, came with risks. Patients nearing the positive end of their treatment would, according to Fishberg, revert to an earlier, more acute stage of tuberculosis if they received poor news from home; far away from their families, they would fail to recover. He clearly had the newfound JCRS—encouraging anyone to come to Denver for their care—at the top of his mind when he stressed the importance of aspiring to be “free from care.”[31]
The January 27, 1905 issue of the Jewish Outlook laid out some of the NJHC’s critiques of the JCRS by way of an editorial comment from that month’s Jewish Charities of New York newsletter. An editor disagreed with three aspects of a recent statement from Rabbi Hillkowitz, a JCRS founder. First and foremost, the JCRS mixed curable and incurable tuberculars in the same place, a practice that was apparently “condemned by every medical authority.” Secondly, the JCRS siphoned funding away from Denver’s pre-established relief societies. Thirdly, instead of helping the consumptives that already lived in Denver, the JCRS “invit[ed] the consumptive poor of the entire United States to flock” to a city that already struggled to care for a large population of underprivileged consumptive migrants.[32]
Another difference between the two Jewish sanatoria of Denver had to do with fundraising; the NJHC sought out their funds from wealthy donors, whereas the JCRS courted numerous small donations (mere dollars compared to hundreds) from fellow working-class Jews.[33] Before the addition of three locally renowned Russian-American Jewish physicians to the JCRS—Spivak, Hillkowitz, and Zederbaum, the latter two having worked for the NJHC in 1899 and 1900—the foundational staff of the JCRS consisted of twenty Jewish immigrant workers with a tin worker, Benjamin Diamond, as the first president. The JCRS advocated for a style of charity that was not “of the head” but rather “of the heart,” a style of care connected to the old Eastern European shtetl, which contrasted sharply with the NJHC brand of scientific charity. The NJHC forwarded the kind of assimilatory care associated with the American and Western European style of philanthropy, characteristic of the Progressive Era. While both institutions were formally nonsectarian, the JCRS followed an informal policy of saving 10 beds at a time at maximum for Gentile patients. Five of the founding twenty members of the JCRS became patients at the JCRS, showing that the underprivileged Jews of Denver had created the institution they themselves needed in response to the NJHC.[34]
In late 1905, the longest-ever edition of the Jewish Outlook commemorated the sestercentennial anniversary of when Jacob Barsimson, then considered the first American Jew, first stepped foot in the New World. A chapter-article about the JCRS, written by a representative of the Society, offered a new perspective on the two sanatoria—mutualistic symbiosis, rather than parasitism. The JCRS, formerly accused of bleeding money from the NJHC, claimed that it had proven “its right to exist” to the team behind the Jewish Outlook.[35] Zederbaum wrote that the JCRS branded itself as a care provider for “that class of consumptives that no other Denver institution [wa]s prepared to look after”—a light dig at the NJHC’s rules against the admittance of late-stagers.[36] This article is a notable point of departure, from a negative point of view regarding the JCRS to a positive one held by the NJHC.
On February 2nd, 1906, the editor of the Jewish Outlook published a perspective on the JCRS that continued this positive streak. According to Dr. Spivak, the secretary of the JCRS, the NJHC had “looked upon our endeavor with the jealous eye of a rival,” but “has at last come to appreciate that our institution, too, is bearing a share” in the fight against tuberculosis.[37] NJHC president Samuel Grabfelder, featured in this perspective, shared this cooperative point of view, stating that the “more institutions of [the JCRS’s] character [that] could be started[,] the better.”[38] This article further marks the departure from the position held by the paper only a year back, that the existence of the JCRS bled the resources that would otherwise go to the NJHC. This article, too, shows the nuanced and shifting dynamics of the connection between the two organizations.
Rabbi Friedman described the original purpose of the NJHC as “a shelter exclusively for dependent Jewish consumptives,” a mission he began in 1890 that was curtailed, by the economic panic of 1893, until 1899. Then, the Hospital was fully built, but remained unused until after the death of Frances Wisebart Jacobs. The philanthropic Order of B’nai B’rith sponsored the NJHC; it opened as the B’nai B’rith Building with the restriction that “only patients in the curable stages of tuberculosis shall be admitted.” Friedman pointed to “the voluntary pale” of the Russian-Jewish enclave of Denver, one of apparent squalor and disease (a reference to the Jewish Pale of Settlement, around which most of the Orthodox Jews in Denver had emigrated from), to emphasize that anyone who migrated to Denver ought to know the goal that those fleeing from Russia “provide for themselves” in Colorado.[39] Post-treatment, the local non-consumptive Jews of Denver were tasked with “restor[ing ‘cured’ tuberculars] to earning power”—another call for middle-class acculturation, on the part of German Reform Jews, for their Orthodox brethren and sistren from the Russian Empire.[40]
The NJHC opened to the public, offering treatment to everyone, not exclusively Jews. But with two factors in mind—first, the reasoned pragmatism behind limiting the patient pool to only “curable” patients, and second, the latent anxiety regarding population density—what led the NJHC to open their doors to non-Jewish patients? The answer likely lies in the aforementioned idea of the “ethnic-based institution,” given the connection of Jacobs to the institution. By curing both Gentiles and Jews, the latter sought to curry assimilative favor from the former. Therefore, the ethnoreligious minority, split between two institutions, oversaw the care of everyone, including the ethnoreligious majority of white Christians, in Denver.
Rabbi Friedman reaffirmed in an editorial from 1907 that the worst thing he could think to do to “a penniless consumptive in the advanced stage of the disease” would be “encourag[ing] him to come to Colorado”—a “fatal error.” The more humane option, he wrote, would be supporting the consumptive “in his home city, where he is surrounded by his family and friends” as, otherwise, the consumptive could “die among strangers.”[41] Friedman dropped the name of the JCRS directly as a contributor to this “unjust burden imposed on” Denver’s Jews that “the limited income of [their] Jewish relief agencies” remained unequipped to fix.[42] Jewish sanatoria discourse shifted once more.
The positive coverage of the JCRS returned yet again to the NJHC mouthpiece in 1909. The Outlook recap of the fourth annual meeting of the JCRS confirmed that the Society’s goals, viewed by Friedman as problematic only two years previously, remained unchanged.[43] Nonetheless, the Outlook editor gave the JCRS some due credit. Some of the “emergency cases” of the JCRS—described in the Outlook as “incurable” just years prior—actually recovered “after proper treatment.”[44]
In 1911, Seraphine Pisko became the Secretary of the NJHC. Succeeding Alfred Muller, Pisko also inherited the Muller scandal, in which he stole around $75,000 (over two and a half million dollars today) of hospital funds. Pisko momentarily restored public trust in the institution by meeting the moment, with her past experience in civic activism, to recover this funding. Later in her career, she reaffirmed an affinity for and kinship with Orthodox culture, but she did not push the NJHC towards any explicit plan of engagement with Yiddish. Within a year of her inheriting the Muller scandal, Pisko faced some criticisms herself, on behalf of her institution—and so did the JCRS. Yaqra de-Shikhvi, the anti-autopsy group, was just one of many sources of friction between the institutions and those they served. Whenever the institutions caught equivalent flack, a marked camaraderie emerged between them. This occasionally quashed their differences, grouping the NJHC and JCRS together as both deserving of credit for similarly humane purposes and parallel approaches.[45]
Things quickly changed once again. A letter from May 1912 sent by Dr. Spivak and published in the Sanatorium elucidates the Society’s perspective on how the NJHC had generally represented the JCRS during this time; Spivak expressed that the NJHC “has been at all times waging war against us.” Articles from the Outlook did indeed reflect that the NJHC considered their counterpart to be a leech both on their revenue and on their mission. Spivak worked to persuade the NJHC that the JCRS filled a complementary role to theirs for the rest of his life.[46]
An article on the history of the JCRS up to 1912, published in the Sanatorium that same year, recounted a series of exchanges that occurred between Spivak (from before he was JCRS Secretary) and Friedman (whom Spivak introduced as an “Opponent”). Friedman had expressed at one “Committee on Organization” meeting in late 1903 that Denver’s charities should consolidate with the NJHC, in order to better enact their combined vision “against [the] soliciting [of ] aid from the outside world” and prevent a wave of consumptive emigrants that the city would struggle to aid. Spivak, meanwhile, “maintained that Colorado has the best climate for consumptives” and that an increase in tuberculars would “result in a greater supply of money.” In one editorial published in the Outlook in early 1904, Friedman demanded that the JCRS “[e]ither… cease sending penniless consumptives to Denver [to] prevent their coming here to a life of destitution, or a National Society for Jewish Consumptives must be organized” to aid these sick emigrants. Spivak responded later that week that the JCRS effectively operated asthe Society Friedman had proposed.[47] Later public quarrels germinated from this initial disagreement as to how to perceive the JCRS compared to the NJHC, and the republication of this epistolary debate a near-decade later proves that it maintained discursive relevance. According to the NJHC, the JCRS failed from the beginning to fulfill the role that the former organization wanted for the latter. To the JCRS, the NJHC appeared actively disrespectful of the institutions’ roles in a parallel mission; the JCRS existed only because, from their perspective, the NJHC neglected the consumptives of later stages and the Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Denver.
In a Secretary’s Report published in the Sanatorium in 1912, Spivak criticized NJHC policy by way of an explanation of the working relationship between the two sanatoria, which he considered to be “sister” institutions.[48] Sixteen percent of all JCRS consumptive cases had been treated first at the NJHC; the “emergency” tuberculars had been kicked out of the latter, but “feeling better under the Colorado skies,” they rejected returning home. When “they remain[ed] in Colorado… penniless and friendless and unable to do a full day’s work,” they ended up at the JCRS, an organization that never asked: “‘Why did you come to us[? Y]ou have not improved; go home and die peacefully among your own. Are there no graves in New York City? Go!’ We have not done it.” Spivak expressed pride in the JCRS’s role going beyond the NJHC and solving the latter’s perceived problems. Definitions of success between these two institutions clearly differed. The NJHC succeeded in its goals by limiting its client pool to those most likely in its estimation to recover; meanwhile, the JCRS succeeded in its goals by taking in those that had been refused by the NJHC.[49] Interestingly, buried in the 1914 Secretary’s Report is the news that a prediction expressed in the first Annual Report of the JCRS, “that other organizations will soon emulate our example,” had finally come true—the NJHC started to take in advanced cases.[50]
An article from the start of the next year’s volume further clarifies the contours of the working relationship between the two sanatoria during the First World War. For one, the NJHC continued to receive monetary support from B’nai B’rith; the JCRS did not receive the same philanthropic support, leading the Society to further emphasize its working class connotation. According to Lee Lichtenstein, a representative of the JCRS, the Society branded itself, not incorrectly, as “the pioneer in the field of taking care of patients in the advanced stages of the disease.” “The [NJHC’s] antagonism that was at first displayed against this” had, according to the JCRS, begun to vanish. “[N]ow[,] several hospitals in Colorado [exist] which take this class of patients”—and, of course, the NJHC admitted these patients themselves by the following year.[51] The pair of sanatoria distinguished themselves with each other in mind. The NJHC branded itself as responsible, only taking in consumptives that they and the larger Jewish community of Denver could actually care for. The JCRS, in response, built itself up as an institution scrappy and audacious enough to fill this imposed care gap, without the NJHC’s organizational support.[52]
Writing for the American Jew in 1915, Friedman connected the development of the NJHC to the wider patterns of American migration and Jewish philanthropy. Most of the Hospital staff found themselves in Denver in the first place because they had sought out a cure for tuberculosis, and were bid by doctors to stay in the sunny, dry, “aseptic” atmosphere thought to be effectively healing when supplemented with the professional and free care that the NJHC set out to provide.[53] However, the buck stopped with “incurable” and “emergency consumptives.” Friedman rationalized the boundary; the “sudden change from sea level to a highly rarified atmosphere,” when combined with “the wearing hardship of long travel,” aggravated an emigrant’s consumption, and sometimes fatally. Incurables were also thought of as injurious to the curables in an emotional sense; the company of incurables reversed a curable’s healing by reminding them of death.[54]
Multivalent representations of the NJHC and JCRS continued into early 1917. According to Spivak, the “limited, exclusive, sectarian or aristocratic” tendencies of national Jewish groups like B’nai B’rith paled in comparison to what the JCRS brought to the table: “the real leaven for nationalization.” The JCRS “helped to unite in one band for a common and unselfish purpose all the Jews of the United States.”[55] On behalf of the JCRS, Spivak credited the Reform, non-Zionist NJHC as a “nationalizing” force, though this went against the grain of the mainstream Reform Jewish position at the time.[56]
Historical Context—Reform Judaism and the Pittsburgh Platform
Pittsburgh began as a rather incidental setting in the life of Rabbi Isaac Wise; he hailed from Bohemia and served first in Albany and then in Cincinnati. Pittsburgh also served an important albeit incidental role to the second of two main minds behind the Pittsburgh Platform—Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler from Bavaria, who served in Detroit, then Chicago, and finally the city of New York. Kohler and Wise both considered Kohler’s father-in-law, Rabbi David Einhorn, to be quite influential to their theologies and ethical bases. Einhorn, a German Jewish immigrant, devoted much rabbinic teaching to challenging the predominant view of Jews as a people set apart. And all three Jewish men related more to America than to their national origins, let alone to an imagined ethnostate.[57]
In 1885, the Jewish community of Pittsburgh hosted a conference of rabbis, a continuation of a Judaic convention in Philadelphia in 1869. The resultant Pittsburgh Platform delineated the lines of American Reform Judaism for decades, forcing every American Jewish congregation to engage with a consensus that required rabbinic explanation against it in lieu of the standard of following it. As such, every American Jewish congregation was affected, with the Reform Jews of Denver being no exception. Denver had a large Reform Jewish community and, within it, a philanthropic establishment that, in the decades after the Pittsburgh Conference, followed the Pittsburgh Platform by criticizing the practices of the Orthodox-run and Zionism-adjacent JCRS. Among the points that the Platform delineated and that the Reform community of Denver tended to agree with was that Jews “consider [them]selves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine… nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” Another was that “the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature… are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism”; this certainly influenced the halakhic discourses related to autopsies that rabbis chimed in on for over a decade afterward.[58]
Overall, Reform Jews “recognize[d,] in Judaism[,] a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason.” The last point of the Pittsburgh Platform, however, falls more in line with the socialist influences of the JCRS than the comparatively bourgeois NJHC: “In… the spirit of the Mosaic legislation, which strives to regulate the relations between rich and poor,” Reform rabbis Wise and Kohler and Orthodox figure Spivak, more so than Reform Rabbi Friedman, “deemed it [their] dut[ies] to participate in the great task of modern times[ and] to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.”[59]
Jewish Positions on Zionism and Secularism, Fin de siècle to Interwar
Decades after the Pittsburgh Platform, the discourses occurring across the Outlook and the Sanatorium regarding the Jewish-run sanatoria of Denver—like whether the JCRS had a “right to exist” or whether Jews should migrate—resembled contemporary Jewish discourses of Zionism.[60] Friedman fleshed out his public opinions on Zionism in various interviews and sermons as Zionist politics developed throughout his time at Temple Emmanuel. In 1917, Friedman reaffirmed his Americanist, anti-Zionist position. He understood “the desire [of Zionists] to return and form a nation of their own.” Reform Jews, however, considered themselves “members of a religion,” not a nation—in line with the Pittsburgh Platform.[61] In December of 1918, in an interview with the Denver Post, he argued a non-Zionist, rather than anti-Zionist, position—essentially, a multi-state solution to the Palestine conflict. American Jews, in his view, wanted “only that Palestine be made an asylum for those of all religions in which the Holy Land is sacred—Moslem as well as Christian and Jew.” Friedman expressed belief that the United States provided a better opportunity for the Jews fleeing from the Jewish Pale of Settlement than Palestine.[62] He stressed the scope of the NJHC in national terms while emphasizing the opposite for Judaism in general.
Two decades later, Friedman’s opinion of Palestine took on a different tenor. In an interview with the Intermountain Jewish News, Friedman praised Palestine as the one place in his travels that had not “succumbed entirely to materialism… the denial of the spiritual and religious.”[63] To Friedman, the Jews brought a “higher standard of living” to the Arab intelligentsia. And in a move toward Zionist apologia, Friedman relegated the ultranationalist sentiments of many Jews across the yishuvim (the Jewish colonies of Palestine) to a few Jabotinskyites, blaming them (not incorrectly) for the nascent Arab antisemitism.[64] While creditable for his estimation of Jabotinsky, Friedman underestimated the man’s acceptance across yishuvim. Jabotinsky’s formulation of Revisionist Zionism and Revisionist Zionist paramilitaries initiated a widespread campaign of terror against Arab natives that should have soured Friedman’s generous interpretation of the wider Zionist coalition of Palestine.
Denver’s Jewish Sanatoria and Philanthropic Leadership
Fannie Lorber and Anna Hillkowitz differed from David and Pisko in their origins but related in their successes in the realm of care-work. As young Eastern European women, fluent in Yiddish but properly Americanized, Lorber and Hillkowitz served the neglected consumptives of Denver who shared their Eastern European background. Both women felt neglected by the NJHC’s oppositional attitude to Orthodoxy (especially brazen in its exclusively non-kosher kitchen), its strict management, its bureaucratic organization, the Progressive-era ideals of ‘scientific charity’ it followed, and thus, in lieu of the compassionate service that the JCRS boasted, a perceived business-like style of care-work. Even worse in the estimation of JCRS representatives was the fact that the NJHC’s subpar state of affairs was largely inaccessible to the most needy (advanced or late-stage) consumptives. The JCRS formed out of the ethnic, class, health, and denominational fissure between middle-class German Reform Jewish immigrants and working-class Russian Orthodox Jews in Denver.[65]
Hillkowitz had moved to Denver in 1890 with her family on account of her father’s asthma (asthma was only later the primary focus of either sanatoria). She co-founded the Denver Sheltering Home for Jewish Children (DSHJC) in 1907. The DSHJC became the National Home for Jewish Children in 1928, the Jewish National Home for Asthmatic Children in 1953, and the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital (CARIH) in 1957. This trajectory shows how Colorado rebranded away from climate curative and toward research nexus, and how its medical community pivoted from a focus on consumption to asthma. In 1978, the CARIH, originally founded by JCRS beneficiaries, merged with the NJHC to become the National Asthma Center of Denver.[66]
Before Denver’s medical community pivoted its focus from tuberculosis in the 1950s, consumption research continued apace. Friedman touted in 1929 that the NJHC’s Research Department was “the only [tuberculosis] research service in the world maintained by Jewish philanthropy.”[67] The rabbi described a “tragic situation” for the hospital that occurred in September, 1926—the NJHC filled to capacity, compiling a waiting list of six months that forced it to turn more people away—until the dedication of a second B’nai B’rith Infirmary Building changed things.[68] New, individual, sound-proofed rooms for patients facilitated the Hospital’s new, specialized treatment. The “Complete Immobilization” or “absolute rest” treatment required that “everything about the patient,” especially their muscles, “be quiet… so that all the energy of the body may go to build up the… weakened lungs” to former health.[69] Germ theory posed no obstacle to this thinking; in fact, theories of contagious communicability only justified the NJHC’s continued existence. The Hospital internalized the advice of the JCRS by following in their footsteps and providing healthcare for Denver’s late-stage and emergency consumptives—but with that, the two sanatoria lost part of their idiosyncratic identity, built through a history of opposition stemming from differences in mission. As the Jewish sanatoria of Denver switched from a palliative model to a research-based model in the 1950s, the DSHJC, founded by the JCRS and absorbed into the NJHC, pivoted to a focus on asthma from an original focus on consumption.[70] The JCRS, for its part, pivoted instead to cancer, with consumption better managed by the availability of drugs like Sulpha, the industrialization of pasteurized milk, and the proliferation of vaccines.[71]
In a speech at a B’nai B’rith convention in 1930, Friedman rationalized the NJHC’s acceptance of non-Jewish patients via an interpretation of Jewish ethics in “the broadest spirit of our traditional ‘Zdokah’” (‘charity’). In the same spirit, only those who could not afford treatment reserved the right to it. The NJHC developed, over thirty-one years, a medical research and training center, the first “Jewish Preventorium for Children,” and “100 private rooms for advanced cases,” all thanks, in full or in part, to sponsorships from B’nai B’rith. Nonetheless, the Hospital faced dire straits in 1930, when Friedman hoped to convince B’nai B’rith to remedy the economic situation of the NJHC once again.[72] The NJHC policy that patients need to secure formal proof of their income and medical status before admission led to the need for the JCRS—but B’nai B’rith refused to fund the JCRS until 1911, because Muller simply disliked Spivak on a personal level. Spivak and Muller’s rivalry presaged that of the two sanatoria when, as early as 1896, Spivak reported Muller’s alleged mismanagement of a Jewish agricultural commune to B’nai B’rith. Muller had taken his grudge to the grave in 1911, at which point B’nai B’rith began funding the JCRS along with the NJHC.[73]
In another merging of practice between the two institutions, the NJHC established its kosher kitchen in 1923. Until then, the NJHC’s menu for patients was another source of resentment on the part of the working-class Orthodox Russian immigrants, who comprised the largest community of Jews in Denver, against the middle-class German Reform Jewish community. Diet was another factor that led to the NJHC falling more in line with JCRS practice. The initial thinking behind the NJHC patient diet policy was that since all consumptives needed protein, all meals were served with milk, butter, and meat—but these meals often broke kashrut, the food restrictions of the Jewish faith. Clearly, science generally trumped orthodoxy at the NJHC. Before changing its kitchen to kosher in 1923, the NJHC exercised no outward concern for following kashrut—even serving clams, a quintessential treif (non-kosher) faux pas, at a banquet by and for Rabbi Friedman.[74]
Moreover, while Friedman acknowledged that Hebrew classes were taught at the NJHC, he was largely silent on Yiddish.[75] The Hebrew-Yiddish distinction matters because Yiddish was associated in the fin de siècle and after with anti-Zionists, like radical intellectuals, working diaspora Jews, and the Haredim, whereas Hebrew was associated with Zionists, who, in fact, cracked down on the language rights of Yiddish speakers in the yishuv in a flexing of newfound power and legitimacy in Palestine. Spivak, for his part, signaled a change, from the old guard of German Jewish leaders of middle-class Americanized Reform backgrounds and non-Zionist leanings, to the new guard of Jewish leaders from the Russian Empire who used a grassroots approach and followed a democratic-socialist model with plenty of room for both Yiddish culture and Zionism.
Spivak paid dues to all Denver synagogues, including Temple Emmanuel while Friedman was rabbi (there were a dozen temples or more in Denver at the time). In a life-long religious re(de)fining, Spivak underwent a transformation from revolutionary to reformer, from secular diaspora nationalist to Orthodox Labor Zionist.[76] His positive views of Americanism emerged in the early 1920s when he went on a humanitarian trip to war-torn Poland, which gave him a gratefulness for the United States and which led him to encourage the acculturation of JCRS patients under his auspices.[77]
Spivak died in October of 1927. Between warm obituaries, news spread of Spivak’s will, which requested that his body be autopsied—entangling the JCRS in the same halakhic discourse faced by the NJHC. Spivak’s viscera was to be interned at “the Workmen’s Circle section of the Golden Hill Orthodox Jewish cemetery, near his deceased JCRS patients,” and his skeleton was to be sent to the University of Jerusalem in Palestine for educational use—a final orienting of his body towards Zion. His will included the Yiddish phrase, “Ikh vel zey bashaynen, zey veln mir bashaynen,” meaning “I will beautify them, and they will beautify me.” Rabbi Friedman, for his part, wrote of Spivak’s death: “[It] affects me… heavier than I can say.”[78]
The Yiddish-English poet Yehoash, who co-founded the JCRS with Spivak, had co-authored a standard Yiddish-Hebrew dictionary with him as well. Another JCRS-affiliated poet, H. Leivick, in his capacities as a consumptive writer in the sanatoria scene between 1932 and 1935, concerned himself mostly with “the idiom of common souls[,] not of common soil.” Yehoash and Leivick both visited Palestine after their stays at the JCRS, but they differed in their conceptions of it. Leivick, with his radical working-class personal history, visited Palestine in the strict capacity of advocating for Yiddish, maligned by Zionists, who generally favored Hebrew as a national language and delegitimized Yiddish as a vulgar vernacular. Yehoash, on the other hand, visited Palestine for explicitly Zionist reasons—an investment in Palestinian soil for Jewish souls. Rather than gracing Palestine with the mythos of Zion, Leivick imbued Colorado with the spirit of the Garden of Eden.[79] The dichotomy between these poets, affiliated with the same institution, connected to it via the same linguistic culture, following the same medical recommendations of writing, mirrors the concern over “dual loyalties” that many Jews of the diaspora had to entertain.[80]
B’nai B’rith has, since Spivak’s death, added fuel to the fire of the accusations against Jews of dual loyalties that continue up to today, with no signs of abating. B’nai B’rith played a major role in the division of Jews along nationalist lines. Through attempting to couple antisemitism and anti-Zionism as synonymous, a process that, led by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), began after the sanatorium movement, B’nai B’rith sullied the non-Zionist reputation that it built for itself during the sanatorium movement in Denver with its funding of both the NJHC and, later, the JCRS.
The ADL was founded by B’nai B’rith in 1913 after an antisemitic hate crime from the same year had catalyzed a necessary Jewish minority defense movement in the United States, an illustration of the antisemitism growing across the country that Abrams has argued that Jews in Denver and in the larger Southwest confronted to a lesser degree compared to their Southern counterparts.[81] Leo Frank, a Jewish man living in Atlanta, a factory executive and a president of a B’nai B’rith lodge, died tragically in 1913 when he was spuriously accused and found guilty of murder of a teenage girl. Shortly after his death penalty was confirmed but commuted, he was abducted by a vigilante mob and lynched. Frank’s lynching emboldened a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which drove Sigmund Livingstone, a Chicagoan lawyer, to found the ADL with sponsorship from B’nai B’rith. The ADL began in response to a surge of American antisemitism, but became, within the span of a few decades, a primary force of conflation between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, which Friedman and others associated with B’nai B’rith via the NJHC fought against in their own lifetimes. Many Jews from between the fin de siècle and the interwar period anticipated the harm that conflation between Zionism and semitism would cause; Zionists armed accusations of dual loyalties with ammunition aimed primarily at Arab Palestinians, but the collateral damage has put non-Zionist Jews in the crossfire as well. Unlike the conflict between the non-Zionist NJHC and the Zionist JCRS from before the founding of Israel, the conflict that the Zionist ADL has instigated against the idea of pro-semitic anti-Zionism in the post-Israel Jewish world has resulted in substantial harm against the Jew in America and elsewhere, and the causes of that harm go beyond the discursive.[82]
The ADL has grown much more powerful than its parent organization, B’nai B’rith. As the Jewish anti-Zionist expert on the Middle East, Alfred Lilienthal, has reported, the ADL has wielded “enormous influence and intimidation, often bordering on blackmail, [aga]in[st] organizations and individuals, particularly people in public life.” “[S]everal ADL leaders… have boasted of ADL’s use of undercover agents” even before 1983 when, in a stunning reversal of its “anti-defamation” position, “individuals or organizations who voiced the slightest criticism of Israel or Zionism found themselves listed in” an easily accessible volume “of their ‘notorious’ activities. All were portrayed as extremists seeking to abolish the state of Israel and/or incite prejudice against Jewish Americans.” Even more chilling,
Following an April raid on the offices of [ADL] by the San Francisco police, the San Francisco Chronicle broke the story of a nationwide political spy operation. ADL had illegally obtained information from a corrupt police officer… [and] a political informant and infiltrator on the ADL payroll since 1960. In the ADL offices were files on Arab Americans and members of Greenpeace, NAACP, the Mills College faculty and various other institutions, groups and individuals.
The story of the NJHC, of H. Leivick of the JCRS, and of many other Jews involved in the sanatoria movement in Denver from the fin de siècle to the interwar period—Jews undeniably concerned with Jewish survival and thriving, with lifetimes of community carework to back it up—disentangles this insidious conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The conflation of Zionist with Jew has implicated, in the eyes of antisemites, all Jewish people in the crimes of “the Jewish state,” damaging the reputation of Jews that Friedman, Jacobs, and other philanthropic Jews were so concerned with improving in Denver.[83]
The story of the JCRS and the NJHC began with disunity, reached a point of relative unity, and ended with the dissolution of Denver’s tuberculosis-related infrastructure altogether. Disunity in Denver, between the immigrant German Reform Jews and Orthodox Jews from the Russian Empire, gave way to a gradual coalescing of sanatorium practice. Jewish radicals whose tuberculosis improved after treatment at the sanatoria met at a third contact zone, the Korngold House, where the radical discourses of the “cured” consumptives influenced Golda Meir; she went on to become the Prime Minister of Israel. B’nai B’rith, originally non-Zionist, went on to found the ADL; as a unit, they became one of Zionism’s, but not Jews’, greatest advocates. The development of Denver sanatoria impacted the course of Zionism, just as the development of Zionism influenced Denver’s sanatoria.
[1] Jeanne E. Abrams, Jewish Women Pioneering the Frontier Trail (New York University Press, 2006): 179-80; and Golda Meir, My Life (Dell Publishing, 1975): 34-50.
[2] Abrams, Jewish Women Pioneering,53, 75-7.
[3] By ‘fin de siècle’ (French for ‘end of century’), I mean the turn of the twentieth century.
[4] By “Jewish Question” I mean the array of discourses that occurred from the mid-eighteenth century to the founding of Israel in the mid-twentieth century that regarded where Jewish people then belonged.
[5] Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34.
[6] Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 38.
[7] Pratt, 38.
[8] Pratt, 40.
[9] Abrams, Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis Movement (University Press of Colorado, 2009): 16; Marjorie N. Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism (NYU Press, 2024): 15-20; and Kelly W. Sundberg, Lauren M. Mitchell & Dan Levinson, “Health, Religiosity and Hatred: A Study of the Impacts of COVID-19 on World Jewry,” Journal of Religion and Health 62 no. 1 (2023): 428-9, 438. For Jewish anti-Zionist historiography, see Lulu S. Joanis, “Jewish Anti-Zionism, Fin de Siècle to Present: Towards a Pro-Semitic Anti-Zionist History,” Research and Creative Activities Symposium (April 24, 2025).
[10] Gabriel N. Slamovits, “Cadaver Donations in the Jewish Legal System,” Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion 21, no. 3 (2021): 436-8.
[11] Zev Farber & Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, “Autopsies II: The National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives,” in Halakhic Realities [vol. 2]: Collected Essays on Organ Donation (Maggid Books, 2017): 384-6.
[12] Farber & Greenberg,“Autopsies II: The National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives,” 392-3, 398-403.
[13] Farber & Greenberg, 386-8, 397-400. Album contributed to the JCRS newspaper—Z. S. Album, “A Visit to the Sanatorium of the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society at Edgewater, Colo.,” Sanatorium (Denver, CO) 10, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1907): 52-3.
[14] Farber & Greenberg,389-91, 411-2.
[15] Farber & Greenberg,394-6, 413.
[16] Farber & Greenberg, 403-10.
[17] Farber & Greenberg, 414-6.
[18] Abrams, Dr. Charles David Spivak, 158.
[19] D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Claudio Las Heras Olivares, & Daniel I. Rees, ”Was the First Public Health Campaign Successful?”American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11, no. 2 (2019): 169-70.
[20] Abrams, Dr. Charles Spivak, 20.
[21] Abrams, Jewish Women Pioneering, 179-80.
[22] Abrams, Dr. Charles Spivak, 17-9.
[23] Abrams, Jewish Women Pioneering, 59.
[24] Abrams, Jewish Women Pioneering, 179-80.
[25] Ernest B. Gilman, Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium (Syracuse University Press, 2015): 42-3.
[26] Gregg Mitman, “Geographies of Hope: Mining the Frontiers of Health in Denver and Beyond, 1870-1965,” Osiris 19, no. 2 (2004): 95-100, 111.
[27] Michael Brown, “The American Element in the Rise of Golda Meir[,] 1906-1929,” Jewish History 6, nos. 1-2 (March 1992): 39-40, 43-5. Meir, My Life, 21-2, 68, 80, 135, 331.
[28] Abrams, Jewish Women Pioneering, 50-5.
[29] Hasia R. Diner & Beryl L. Benderly, “‘Full of the Troubles of Our Neighbors’: Responding to the Great Migration,” in Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in Colonial Times to the Present (2002): 224-7.
[30] Abrams, Jewish Women Pioneering, 63-5.
[31] Maurice Fishb[e]rg, “Life of Consumptives in Denver Boarding Houses,” Jewish Outlook 1, no. 41 (Aug. 12, 1904): 1-2.
[32] Ben Amittai, “The Jewish Consum[p]tives’ Relief Society,” Jewish Outlook (Denver, CO) 2, no. 13 (Jan. 27, 1905): 6-7.
[33] Abrams, Blazing the Tuberculosis Trail: The Religio-Ethnic Role of Four Sanatoria in Early Denver, monograph 6, Colorado Historical Society (1990): 35-6.
[34] Abrams, Blazing the Tuberculosis Trail, 31-4, 37-44.
[35] Adolph Zederbaum, “Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society” [“JCRS”], Jewish Outlook 3, no. 4 (Nov. 24, 1905): 40.
[36] Zederbaum, “JCRS,” 38.
[37] “Annual Meeting of the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society,” Jewish Outlook 3, no. 14 (Feb. 2, 1906): 7.
[38] “Annual Meeting of the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society,” Jewish Outlook 3, no. 14 (Feb. 2, 1906): 10.
[39] William S. Friedman, “Modern Method of Fighting Tuberculosis: What the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives Is Doing,” Jewish Outlook 2, no. 46 (Sep. 15, 1905): 1-2.
[40] Friedman, “Modern Method,” 10.
[41] Friedman, “The Advanced Consumptive,” Jewish Outlook 4, no. 23 (Apr. 5, 1907): 6.
[42] Friedman, “The Advanced Consumptive,” 7.
[43] “Annual Meeting of the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society,” Jewish Outlook 6, no. 19 (Mar. 5, 1909): 1.
[44] “Annual Meeting of the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society,” Jewish Outlook 6, no. 19 (Mar. 5, 1909): 3.
[45] William Toll, “Seraphine Pisko at Denver’s National Jewish Hospital: Gender and the Origins of Philanthropic Professionalism,” Western States Jewish History 30, no. 1 (Oct. 1997): 11-2, 20-4.
[46] C. D. Spivak, “Reply,” [Correspondence], Sanatorium 6, no.s 4-5 (July-Oct., 1912): 145.
[47] “The Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society: A Brief Historical Sketch,” Sanatorium 6, no.s 4-5 (July-Oct., 1912): 113-22.
[48] Spivak, “Secretary’s Report,” Sanatorium 6, no. 6 (Nov., 1912): 193.
[49] Spivak, “Secretary’s Report,” Sanatorium 6, no. 6 (Nov., 1912): 190-2, 195-8.
[50] Spivak, “Secretary’s Report,” Sanatorium 8, no. 1 (Jan.-Apr., 1914): 92-6.
[51] Lee Lichtenstein, “What is the JCRS[?]” Sanatorium 7, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb., 1913): 14.
[52] Lichtenstein, “JCRS,” 13.
[53] Friedman, “The Free Hospital for Consumptives,” The American Jew, OV Folio 1 [WH148], Friedman Papers (May, 1915): 13.
[54] Friedman, “The Free Hospital,” 12.
[55] Spivak, “The Jewish National Committee on Tuberculosis,” Sanatorium 11, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1917): 8.
[56] Spivak, “The Jewish National Committee on Tuberculosis,” 7.
[57] Rebecca Parks, “The Pittsburgh Platform,” American Eras: Primary Sources Vol. 1: Development of the Industrial United States, 1878-1899 ([1885]2013): 372-374.
[58] Isaac M. Wise & Kaufmann Kohler, “The Pittsburgh Platform,” 372-374.
[59] Wise & Kohler, “The Pittsburgh Platform,” 372-374.
[60] Spivak, “Relief Work Among the Jewish Tuberculous—Its Nationalizing Aspect,” Sanatorium 11, no. 3 (July-Sep., 1917): 49-50.
[61] “Denver Jews Rejoice at Jerusalem Victory,” Denver Express [later Denver Post], OVFolio 1 [WH148], Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives, Rabbi William S. Friedman Papers (Dec. 11, 1917). The headline really refers to C. E. H. Kauvar, the Conservative Rabbi of the Beth HaMedrosh Synagogue, and his congregation; Friedman carried the expected measured and ambivalent perspective of a religious Jewish non-Zionist.
[62] “Rabbi Opposes Jewish Nation for Palestine,” Denver Post, OVFolio 1 [WH148], Friedman Papers (Dec. 10, 1918).
[63] “Rabbi Friedman Praises Spirit of People Rebuilding Palestine,” Intermountain Jewish News (Denver, CO), OVFolio 1 [WH148], Friedman Papers (Sep. 3, 1937): 1.
[64] “Rabbi Friedman,” 2.
[65] Mitman, “Geographies of Hope,” 103-6.
[66] Mitman, 103-6.
[67] Friedman, “The National Jewish Hospital: Its Work and Needs,” Box 24, Envelope 1 [M1250], DPL Special Collections and Archives, National Jewish Hospital History and Reports (Jan.-Mar.?, 1929): 4.
[68] Friedman, “The National Jewish Hospital,” 6.
[69] Friedman, “The National Jewish Hospital,” 8.
[70] Friedman, “Report on the National Jewish Hospital 94, 103-5, 111.
[71] Andrea Jacobs, “The Jewish Consumptive[s’] Relief Society: Why Jews Came to Colorado,” Western States Jewish History 45, no. 3 (2013): 243-4.
[72] Friedman, “Report on the National Jewish Hospital for the Quinquennial Convention of the Constitution Grand Lodge of B’nai B’rith: Cincinnati, Ohio, April, 1930,” Box 24, Envelope 1, 1915-1930 [M1250], NJH History and Reports: 1-8.
[73] Abrams, Dr. Charles David Spivak, 86-93.
[74] Abrams, Blazing the Tuberculosis Trail, 17-30.
[75] Abrams, Blazing the Tuberculosis Trail, 1-12.
[76] Abrams, Dr. Charles David Spivak, 94, 100-1, 104, 111, 116.
[77] Abrams, Dr. Charles David Spivak, 143, 150-1, 156.
[78] Abrams, Dr. Charles David Spivak, 169–84.
[79] Gilman, Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium, 42-3.
[80] Feld, The Threshold of Dissent, 23, 34, 41.
[81] Abrams, Jewish Women Pioneering, 63-5.
[82] Cynthia Golembeski, “Anti-Defamation League,” Encyclopædia Britannica, published Feb. 2, 2015, accessed Nov. 30, 2025; and Alfred M. Lilienthal, “The Other Side of the Coin: The Changing Role of B’nai B‘rith’s Anti-Defamation League,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (June, 1993): 18, 40.
[83] Golembeski, “Anti-Defamation League”; and Lilienthal, “The Other Side of the Coin,” 18, 40.
