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  • Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880-1920: From Caste to Class
  • Karen Brodkin
Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880-1920: From Caste to Class, by Eli Lederhendler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 224 pp. $24.95.

Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism is an important, thoughtful, and very readable challenge to conventional explanations of immigrant Eastern European Jews' adaptation to American society. Lederhendler takes on post-World War II arguments that the keys to Jewish success in the United States lay in the cultural repertoire (or cultural capital) they brought with them from Eastern Europe. Valorization of strong families, a strong work ethic, and tightly knit communities were cultural elements that made Jews well placed to adapt to American industrial capitalism. As well as these more conservative model minority explanations, Lederhendler also challenges culturalist interpretations from the political left, notably that Jews brought with them a strong working-class and socialist political consciousness that made Jews well-prepared to contribute greatly to working-class progressive American politics. Lederhendler argues that such arguments have it backwards. These cultural traits, which we take as emblematic of Old World Jewish culture, were made in America, and it was the relatively open economic and social conditions of a dynamic U.S. industrial capitalism that provided the material conditions for their development.

The argument is carefully made and persuasive: Russia was late and light in developing capitalism; artisan conditions prevailed over industrial organizations of work; and the capitalist sector was small and weak. He shows that arguments to the effect that Jews were culturally preadapted to urban life and industrial occupations simply do not hold up to the facts: Jews were geographically segregated in the Pale and peripheral to such capitalist modernizing as there was in Russia; the economy in which they were enmeshed was a Jewish ethnic economy, not urban, and it was artisan rather than industrially based. Not least, Jews were undergoing massive pauperization in the late nineteenth century, and this put Jewish society under great cultural stress. Growing numbers of Jews came to lack the economic wherewithal to fulfill [End Page 145] the kinds of self-respecting social relationships and obligations which were at the heart of Jewish communal life and culture. Lederhendler sees this as a kind of societywide loss of honor—honor in the double sense of a meeting the obligations of one's place in a hierarchy of social prestige, and honor as a more general shared system of meaning. The turmoil and the new ideas generated in the Old World—Hasidism and an artisan strike movement being among the most significant—were quite different from the values and alignments that were subsequently born from U.S. experiences. Lederhendler argues that cultural preadaptation arguments greatly understate the economic and cultural difficulties the immigrants faced. Nevertheless, however disruptive and traumatic, migration was, for growing numbers of Jews toward the end of the nineteenth century, the best of the bad choices available.

In America, old-world status criteria were upended; so too was social meaning. Economic success and individual effort were the coins of the new realm in a relatively open class system, and Jews were working in the heart of the leading industries of the new urban industrial order. What we take as Jewish model minority culture or as typically Jewish liberalism were adaptations to the specific peculiarities of America's version of an emerging industrial order; thus Lederhendler compares the different adaptations of the Eastern European Jewish diaspora in the different places to which they emigrated.

Although Lederhendler is a historian, this book has an anthropological sensibility, in that the author's more general intent is to challenge the hegemony of what he calls human capital, cultural, or identity theories as explanatory frames for studying migration and ethnicity. Here the argument is that class is a more robust explanation than identity (culture) for understanding immigration as social and cultural process. Class analysis has two aspects for Lederhendler. It is about the impact of macrosocial forces (in contrast to individual or collective agency), and it is about economic relations (as opposed to cultural or ethnic identities). His strength is to pay serious attention to class, not as a prestige...

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