Strong Armed: Jewish Organized Crime in New York

Organized crime was part and parcel of the American Jewish immigrant experience

Morris Rubin. Abraham Nowak. Morris Gelbman. Ida Braeman. Samuel Kapper. These names are largely forgotten today. All six died amid violent labor clashes between Jewish workers and their bosses, who, more often than not, were fellow Jewish immigrants. While the encounter between Jews and modern American capitalism was largely successful, this integration also had a dark underside.

Strong Armed tells the story of labor racketeering in American Jewish history, detailing how organized crime assumed power in Jewish communities of New York City throughout the early twentieth century. As nearly two million Jews left Europe for the United States, Jewish immigrants entered an ethnic economy in which Jewish employers and Yiddish-language unions jostled for dominance. Immigrant-run corporations allied with organized crime in their efforts to suppress the Jewish labor movement. New York businesses created a booming strikebreaking industry, which united crime with capitalism. In turn, the United Hebrew Trades (UHT) and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) hired their own Jewish gangsters, figures whom immigrants called Yiddishe shtarke, “Jewish strong arm men,” the American Jewish “racketeer.”

Historian Aaron Welt explores how New York City’s ethnic economy of garment making, kosher food production, and urban construction fused with organized crime during this period of nationwide industrial conflict and international migration. He reveals that while American conditions created the Jewish gangster, the Yiddish untervelt (“underworld”), much like the Italian mafia, exhibited strong influences from Jewish life in eastern Europe.

Offering a fascinating reevaluation of how American capitalism developed from the world of organized crime, Strong Armed attests to the important role organized crime played in the process of Jews becoming American.