YIVO Archives – Recent Accessions: Letter to the Textile Yarn Agency, Brooklyn

Martin Smolin has donated a copy of a letter his father, Jacob Smolin, proprietor of the Textile Yarn Agency, in Brooklyn, received from Utah Woolen Mills in 1920. As an artifact, the letter not only attests to the large presence of Jews in the garment trade, but also to the still tenuous position of Jews in American society. To people like Smolin’s customer in Utah, far from the large cities of the northeast that had the biggest Jewish populations, Jews were exotic others, but interpersonal contact sometimes resulted in a challenge to long-held stereotypes.