“Composite portraiture of the Jewish type.” From “The Life, Letters and Labors of Francis Galton” by Karl Pearson, circa 1883.

By Ari Forsyth

“The government should first sterilize those whom it definitely knows to be afflicted with hereditary weaknesses — inmates of state institutions. It should continue to press on in its campaign for purity by examining all the people, weeding out the undesirable.”

This unapologetic promotion of a eugenic “campaign for purity” sounds like it could be a passage from a Nazi policy, but it actually appears in a self-published political pamphlet written by a nineteen-year-old Jewish student at the University of Washington in 1934.

Jack Steinberg, 1934

Born to Russian Jewish parents in Seattle in 1915, Jack Steinberg was a progressive liberal who dedicated his life to fighting racism and strengthening Seattle’s Jewish community. After graduating from the University of Washington Law School in 1938, Steinberg quickly established a reputation as a “progressive young lawyer.” Throughout the next decade, he worked pro-bono as an attorney for the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), ran for state House of Representatives on a Democratic ticket, and published editorials in local newspapers decrying Hitler’s militarization of Germany and anti-Black racism in the American South. Steinberg would go on to serve as president of Seattle Talmud Torah Hebrew School (renamed Seattle Hebrew Academy in 1969) and of the Seattle division of the American Jewish Congress.

Why would a progressive Jewish American leader promote eugenic sterilization? To answer this question, we need to revisit the complex history of early twentieth-century Jews and the American eugenics movement.

Defining eugenics

The term “eugenics” first appeared in the late nineteenth century following the formulation of one of the most studied scientific concepts of all time: evolution. In 1883, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911), proposed that humans could control their own evolution through a program of selective breeding that he termed “eugenics,” from the Greek eugenes, “good birth.” Galton defined eugenics as “the science of improving stock… to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” In other words, eugenics was the science of achieving human progress by controlling the reproduction of various groups within a nation.

“Eugenics makes the world go ’round.” The cover of the satirical magazine Puck from June 1913.

From 1900 to 1945, eugenics emerged as an organized scientific and social reform movement in over thirty countries, predicated on genetic determinism, the belief that immutable hereditary traits determined human social and behavioral differences. Eugenicists created new parallel and overlapping classifications for “defective” individuals and “primitive” races and they plotted them on an imagined timeline of human progress. By advocating policies such as sterilization, institutionalization, immigration restrictions, and anti-miscegenation laws, eugenicists believed they were promoting social progress by purging dangerous and unworthy bodies from the nation.

The rise of eugenics coincided with the greatest period of immigration in United States history. Between 1900 and 1915, over 15 million immigrants arrived in the United States, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe, sparking debates over newcomers’ fitness for self-government as American citizens. Eugenics provided a scientific rationale for growing anti-immigration sentiment that culminated in the racially restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924.

Jews, race, and disability in the eugenics era

The rise of nativism and eugenics rendered Jewish claims to national belonging remarkably precarious in the early twentieth-century United States. Although at odds with our twenty-first-century ideas about race, it was common until the late 1800s — for Jews and non-Jews alike — to view Jewish peoples of diverse backgrounds and geographies as members of a single Jewish race, generally perceived to fall within the boundaries of whiteness. Identifying as “Israelites” or “Hebrews” enabled many nineteenth-century Jews to express Jewish “groupness” — solidarity, cultural particularity, and collective pride — without compromising their status as white Americans. (Though some Jews, such as Sephardi immigrants from the Ottoman Empire and multi-racial Jews from the Caribbean, had more complex and precarious relationships to whiteness and Jewish identity.)

Evelyn Garfield, Ph.D., writes a letter to The New York Times debunking recently published claims that Russian Jews had “low intellectual capacity.” February 1923. Via the American Philosophical Society.

However, with the dramatic increase in Jewish immigration in the late 20^th century, Jews were increasingly imagined as an external racial threat. Leaders of the American eugenics movement, such as Madison Grant and Harry H. Laughlin, argued that members of the Jewish race were intellectually and morally defective and that Jewish immigration would infect the body politic and pollute the American gene pool. In “The Passing of the Great Race,” Madison Grant went beyond anti-immigration rhetoric to call for the sterilization of an ever-widening circle of those he considered unfit for self-government: from “criminals” to the “diseased and the insane” to “weaklings” or “worthless racial types” such as Jews.

Eugenic discourses drew a line between Jews and intellectually disabled people, framing both as perils to the purity of the white race. Alarmist rhetoric over Jewish immigration collided with an early twentieth-century moral panic over the “menace of the moron.” Eugenicists viewed both “Jews” and “morons” as especially dangerous because they were visually indistinguishable from the mainstream (white) population, and their rates of reproduction were believed to outpace those of “normal” Anglo-Saxon citizens.

Jewish American thinkers and eugenics

Anxious to separate Jewish American identity from the stigma of disability, Jewish American social scientists and religious leaders waded into public debates over race and eugenics. In 1911, Maurice Fishberg, chief medical examiner of the United Hebrew Charities of New York, published an anthropological study on the bodies and habits of Jews. In “The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment,” Fishberg used phrenology, a discredited science linking ability to head shape, to refute the notion of innate Jewish racial inferiority and, indeed, the idea of a single Jewish race.

“Cephalic index.” A graph charting head sizes of Jews from different regions, from Maurice Fishberg’s “The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment,” 1911.

His study affirmed contemporary views of American Jews, particularly Jewish men, as especially prone to hysteria and criminality, but Fishberg claimed that Jewish disabilities were historically produced, not genetically inherited. “The nervousness of the Jews depends more on their environment than on ethnic peculiarities,” he declared, as should be expected “among people with such an enormous amount of suffering and martyrdom.”

Fishberg argued that American Jews were white, civilized, fit, and sane and, therefore, capable of assimilating into American “Anglo-Saxon communities.” However, his argument also framed Jews from Asia and Africa (who he believed were infused with “negro blood”), Jewish “mental defectives,” and Jews who kept the Sabbath as backward, un-American, and essentially inferior.

At the same time, many mainstream Jewish religious leaders such as Stephen Wise (Portland), Emil G. Hirsch (Chicago), Rudolph Coffee (Pittsburgh), Leon Harrison (St. Louis), Louis Mann (New York), and David de Sola Pool (New York) joined their Protestant and Catholic counterparts in embracing eugenic ideas as part of their progressive liberal theological doctrines.

Anxious to refute notions of Jewish cognitive capacity and eager to affirm the compatibility of Judaism and modern science, some religious figures, like Reform Rabbi Max Reichler, even endorsed a form of “Jewish eugenics.” In his 1915 paper “Jewish Eugenics,” Reichler argued that the outcomes of rabbinical traditions regulating Jewish lineage were akin to those of modern eugenics because they “naturally” eliminated “undesirable elements in the Jewish race.”

Opposing determinism but affirming “proper eugenics”: The case of Franz Boas

Support for eugenic policies was never uncontroversial, however. Many early twentieth-century American Jews voiced public opposition to eugenics. Perhaps the most famous critic of eugenics science was cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, himself Jewish, who famously discredited Maurice Fishman’s earlier studies, which asserted a genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews. In his 1916 article “Eugenics,” Boas challenged eugenicists’ claims that eugenic population control could eliminate social problems like disease and poverty.

However, Boas was still supportive of what he deemed the “proper field of eugenics”:

“To suppress those defective classes whose deficiencies can be proved by rigid methods to be due to hereditary causes, and to prevent unions that will inevitably lead to the birth of disease-stricken progeny.”

Boas exemplifies the extent to which progressive attitudes toward race and Jewish identity could enable eugenic attitudes toward disability. While Jewish eugenicists and progressives debated the degree to which genetics determined social outcomes, they were united in the belief that efficiency, science, and professional expertise were the best ways to solve social problems and a shared vision of progress that viewed the elimination of disabled people as critical to the perfection of society.

Non-Jewish progressives like Margaret Sanger made similar arguments, refuting the biological inferiority of marginalized groups like women but upholding the ableist notion that disability justified civil inequality and social elimination.

Jack Steinberg and eugenic sterilization in the State of Washington

With this context, we can now return to Seattle in 1934 to understand how Jack Steinberg came to view eugenic legislation as a progressive policy. In his pamphlet “The Next Government in America,” Steinberg quotes early twentieth-century writings by eugenicists who found that two percent of the national population were “afflicted with diseases of the mind and body.”

The nineteen-year-old warns his readers that such “forces of destruction will continue to plague the race” if “imbeciles,” “morons,” the “insane,” the “deformed,” and the “criminally afflicted” are allowed to reproduce. Ultimately, his pamphlet argues that the future state government should sterilize American citizens with hereditary disabilities to prevent the birth of intellectually or physically “crippled” babies.

When Steinberg published his pamphlet in 1934, did he know that the current government was sterilizing American citizens? Washington state was one of 30 states to adopt compulsory sterilization laws during the eugenics era. Between 1921 and 1944, 685 disabled and socially disadvantaged people in Washington were coercively sterilized, primarily those medically incarcerated in state institutions, because they were (believed to be) intellectually or developmentally disabled. The vast majority were poor women, especially unwed mothers.

This systematic sterilization campaign peaked between 1938 and 1940, driven by the participation of local and state government officials, superintendents of state institutions, doctors, nurses, social workers, lawyers, and sometimes even the family members of those affected.

Eugenics: Past and present

There is no evidence to suggest that Jack Steinberg supported eugenic sterilization after he published his 1934 pamphlet. The 1930s represented a turning point in the history of the American eugenics movement. US engagement in World War II helped to disentangle eugenics from American patriotism. After 1945, the crimes of the Nazi regime were revealed, and connections between German and American sterilization laws (which had inspired those of the Nazis) forced American eugenicists to abandon public support for sterilization.

By the 1940s, eugenics had been discredited as a pseudoscience, but it did not vanish. Adherents rebranded themselves as geneticists and shifted their rhetoric from arguments about social progress to individual choice. The American Eugenics Society never disappeared. In 1972, it changed its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology but stated that the new name did not align with a change in interest or policy.

Conclusion: Progress towards what?

Throughout the eugenics era, many progressive Jewish liberals, like Jack Steinberg, expressed public support for eugenic policies targeting disabled people. Why?

In the early twentieth century, the rise of eugenics collided with factors such as mass Jewish migration to generate unpredicted levels of vulnerability and fear among Jewish American communities. In this context, American Jews waded into public discussions about race and eugenics, anxious to assert Jewish national belonging. In doing so, they often affirmed the idea that disabled people were the justified targets of state-sanctioned violence.

Grappling with this complex history offers critical insights into liberal politics, Jewish American identity, and disability justice today. It forces us to ask ourselves:  How does our current fear shape our politics? What hierarchies have we internalized? Who is included in our liberal visions of progress?

Ari Forsyth is a Ph.D. student in history specializing in race, gender, and Jewish identity in the early twentieth-century United States. A social and cultural historian by training, Ari’s work bridges the fields of United States history, global Jewish history, comparative race and colonialism, disability studies, and Science, Technology, and Society (STS). Ari’s dissertation investigates Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish American women’s experiences as reformers, social workers, and criminalized subjects in early twentieth-century U.S. cities like New York and Seattle to understand connections between disability, gender normativity, and whiteness. Their teaching and research interests include U.S. imperial formations, Jewish internationalism, women in helping professions, social science and technology, urban policing, racial hierarchies, migration, disability, gender, and sexuality. When they aren’t working, Ari loves watching Star Trek, making zines and linocuts, two-stepping to fast drums, reading Le Guin, and riding public transportation.