Antisemitism during the early 19th century

Question

What mainly caused American Jewish Immigration during the 1900s-1930s?

I wrote the Bolshevik Revolution, but my teacher said Jewish immigration was not triggered by that.

This is what I wrote:

The Red scares were one reaction to the combined fear of communism that spread throughout the United States in the 1920s and the 1930s, as a result of Jewish immigration from Europe. During the Russian Revolution in World War I, Vladimir Lenin, with his faithful Bolshevik workers, led a successful revolution against Czar Nicholas in 1917, transforming Russia into a Communist state and inspiring American fear of Bolsheviks. During the 1900s, pogroms in Russia were violent attacks against Jews that continued in the 1920s, even with Lenin’s new leadership. Russian Jews saw the United States as an optimistic place of opportunity and safety for their families with Russia’s new leadership and the pogroms, and so at least thousands of Russian Jews started immigrating to the United States.

That means that my entire paragraph is wrong. I tried researching it, but I am also having no luck

Answer 1

I see where you were going with your thought process because you are right, Russian Jews certainly received harsh intolerance throughout Communist Russia. Further research concluded that the Soviet Union ramped up their Anti-Semitism under the reign of Joseph Stalin in the late 1940s.

Maybe your teacher is referring more to what was going on in Germany in the early 1900s. Germany during this time was the main adversary of the Western Allies of two World Wars, and we know the horrible tragedies that accompany Adolf Hitler's reign against the Jewish population. Events such as Kristallnacht (One night, many Jewish synagogues & businesses were destroyed, many were killed & many were sent to the concentration camps; 1938) & the horrors of the Holocaust (Around 6 million Jews died, nearly 2/3 of Europe's Jewish population).

To wrap up, I believe that you are correct with the Bolshevik explanation, but perhaps your instructor was looking for the main reason that many Jewish immigrants came to America in the early 20th century was due to the rising power of Germany & the aftermath of Germany. As you said, America was a beacon of hope from all the hardships that Jews faced in Europe at this time.

Hopefully this helped!