Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920 (review)

At times, reading Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism felt like listening to a conversation between Lederhendler and Stephen Steinberg, whose The Ethnic Myth: Race Ethnicity and Class in America (Boston, 1981) refuted the prevailing scholarly and popular assumption that culture shaped Jewish success. Steinberg recognized no cultural proclivity toward education, hard work, or middle-class lifestyle that was especially conducive to immigrant Jews’ relatively rapid movement up the economic ladder; rather, he attributed a convergence between their pre-migration urban industrial skills and their economic opportunities in the United States (primarily, the garment trades) to the ability of many Jews to leave poverty faster than other immigrant groups. If anything, traditional Jewish values hindered rather than fostered economic mobility.

Nearly three decades later, Lederhendler has revised and, in some ways, radicalized Steinberg’s contextual analysis. Although both scholars highlight the centrality of economic conditions in the new context and discredit the importance of static cultural values, Lederhendler departs from Steinberg when he downplays all pre-migration assets, including the occupational skills that immigrant Jews transported as part of their baggage. For Lederhendler, in the same way that values changed and were not simply transplanted from East Europe to the United States, “work skills were acquired, not transferred” (47). Like the dynamic process of culture that evolves from one context to the next, skills emerged in response to the new environment. For Lederhendler, Steinberg may have debunked one powerful ethnic myth, but he proceeded to substitute it with a new one.

Lederhendler’s provocative analysis begs for comparative study. If, indeed, immigrants bring little or nothing useful with them to their new homes, why did Italians and Jews fare differently when they arrived in the United States and encountered the same “advanced commercial and industrial economy” (53)? The only answer that Lederhendler provides comes by way of a brief discussion about how East European Jewish factory workers benefited from the ethnic-based hiring practices of German Jewish manufacturers. Being critical of the skills-transfer thesis is laudable, and Lederhendler provides convincing counter-evidence about it. An alternative argument to replace the dominant framework would make Lederhendler’s book even stronger.

At a time when the interdisciplinary field of American Jewish studies is dominated by questions of race and ethnicity, Lederhendler’s refreshing book highlights the centrality of class. Since it is neither essentialist nor self-constructed, class avoids “the conceptual quagmire of Jewish ethnicity” (118). Relying on history, sociology, anthropology, and memoir, Lederhendler decisively severs the immigrant Jews’ experience of capitalism in their countries of origin from their experiences in the United States.