American Jewish Men and the Anxieties of Breadwinning

• In Event: American Jews and the Transformations of Masculinity

Abstract

In the United States, economic success or failure measured a man. Thrust into a society where a male breadwinner ethic prevailed, most immigrant Jewish men wholeheartedly embraced the American pursuit of economic success, even when their wages proved insufficient to support their families. This drive for financial stability and aspirations for a better life, coupled with American cultural standards that defined male success in terms of economic accomplishment, weighed heavily on successive generations of American Jewish men.
The study of Jewish men as gendered subjects opens up new insights for scholars of American Jewish history, a field that has generated copious scholarship on Jewish women but has produced relatively little on the gendered experiences of Jewish men. Immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe found the male breadwinner ethic particularly jarring, since they came from a society that endorsed married women’s work as a cultural norm. Yet once in the United States, most Jews quickly embraced middle-class standards of gendered economic behavior despite their initial poverty. As Jewish immigrants sought to conform to middle-class standards of respectability, Jewish men increasingly staked their self-worth on their ability to succeed financially. Constant pressure to find steady work in their early years in America, and profound concern with maintaining middle-class status once achieved, became overwhelming preoccupations for most American Jewish men.
This paper focuses primarily on the work experiences of immigrant Jewish men from Eastern Europe. It explores both observations about Jewish men as workers and providers offered by journalists, social workers and other “experts” and also considers the experiences and reflections of Jewish men themselves. In both these arenas, no single portrait emerges. To the contrary, definitions of masculinity, Jewish men’s attitudes and experiences, and the ways that they were portrayed not only varied widely but often reveal contradictory depictions and assessments. The various meanings ascribed to Jewish men’s pursuit of economic success shed light on the multiple constructions of Jewish masculinity even as they reveal broader anxieties and expectations that Jews brought to American life and that Americans articulated about Jews.

author

• Beth S. Wenger, University of Pennsylvania