From The Peopling of New York City
Jewish-American organized crime largely originated from the immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jewish-American gangsters were involved in many areas of crime, including racketeering, bootlegging, prostitution and narcotics. This organized crime was a matter of obvious concern to the community, because Jewish gangster-ism was seen as irreconcilable with the ethics of Judaism and fed anti-Semitic prejudice against Jews. Jewish organized crime was in no way representative of the majority of Jewish immigration and its offspring. Nevertheless, it was exploited by anti-Semites and anti-immigration forces as arguments to bolster their prejudices. However, it did have a large presence on the Lower East Side.
Jewish organized crime was a reflection of the ethnic succession among gangsters, which has tended to follow the immigrant waves in the United States: English, German, Irish, Jewish and then Italian.
In the early 1900s, Jewish-American organized crime arose among slum kids who developed into well organized gangs in a wide variety of criminal enterprises boosted by Prohibition. For both second-generation Jewish and Italian immigrants, the lure of crime could compete quite successfully with mainstream opportunities. There was a Jewish "crime wave" in early 20th-century New York. About a sixth of the city's felony arrests were Jews. Many young Jewish criminals gravitated toward the "rackets," where they met up with the children of Irish, Italian, and other immigrants. [1]
Jewish-American organized crime derived from dislocation and poverty, the sort of thing that fosters criminality among any other ethnicity in a similar situation. Few of the Jewish gangsters were actually religiously observant. [2]
Much like Irish-Americans and other ethnicities (with exception to Italian-American criminal organizations), Jewish-American presence in organized crime gradually faded after World War II. Jewish-American individuals remained associated with organized crime figures, but the criminal organizations and gangs which once rivaled the Italian and Irish-American mobsters during the first half of the 20th century have long since disappeared. As Jews improved their conditions, the Jewish thug and racketeer either disappeared or merged into a more assimilated American crime environment. American Jews quietly buried the public memory of the gangster past; unlike the Mafia, famous Jewish American gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz and Bugsy Siegel founded no crime families.
References
- ↑ The Second Generation from the Last Great Wave of Immigration: Setting the Record Straight, by Nancy Foner, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York & Richard Alba, State University of New York at Albany, October 2006
- ↑ But They Were Good to Their People, American Jewish Historical Society