Jews Against Reform; Jewish Organized Crime and Progressive Political Culture, 1880 - 1912

• In Event: Jews in the American Progressive Era; Cultural and Political Encounters in the Era of Mass Migration and Urban Reform, 1900 - 1920

Abstract

Americans Jews proved largely compatible with the political culture of progressivism, forging a relationship with urban liberalism that lasted throughout the twentieth century. However, the development of Yiddish-inflected organized crime networks in the first several decades of the twentieth century in New York and other large cities represented an American Jewish opposition to progressive politics, culture, and economic thinking. Yiddish-speaking crime bosses who became embedded in various Jewish immigrant-led industries during the Progressive Era reflected a working-class and urban culture that viewed state activity suspiciously and even, in its extremes, a force to resist and counter. Along with other immigrants, Yiddish-speaking Jews developed a political perspective forged by experiences with imperial European powers, in which Jewish economic survival often depended upon skirting state oversight. The ambitious endeavors of the Progressive Movement, which entailed an expansion of governmental authority over the American economy and society, had to reckon with working-class immigrants and migrants whose understandings of state power discouraged wholehearted obedience to the law, including scores of Jews.
Across the Yiddish-inflected neighborhoods of New York in the early twentieth century, gambling-house bosses, brothel-owners, saloon-keepers, and other marginal business entrepreneurs sparred with municipal state as it pursued its reform agenda. These commercial ventures - sometimes legitimate, sometimes not, and very often somewhere in between, and revealed through crime reports written by Yiddish-speaking detectives - demonstrated that allying with the Democratic Party's Tammany Hall political machine, the primary target of good-government activists, proved necessary to maintain their enterprises. Illicit business-ownership, combined with friendly relations with Tammany Hall officials, provided many Jewish immigrants a ticket out of the industrial working-class and into property ownership and electoral influence. Jewish organized crime provided the ladder for some of the first Jews on Manhattan's East Side to garner significant economic and political power, like the Tammany politician Martin Engel, the gaming house owner Sam Paul, the racketeer Benny Fein, and the madam Rosie Hertz. Jewish organized crime bosses took a stand against landmark liberal achievements such the Protocols of Peace, New York's regulations over industry and urban space, the legal codification of bourgeois and Victorian Protestant norms like Prohibition; in short, the enlargement of state power, including in American cities, at the heart of the Progressive Era reform. Jewish organized crime represented an anti-progressive politics among the Yiddish-speaking working-class, which had a distinct influence over American Jewish politics in the U.S. over the twentieth century.

Author

• Aaron Welt, New York University