Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism 1880-1920

Eli Lederhendlers Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism 18801920: From Caste to Class reexamines the immigration of Russian Jews to the United States around the turn of the 20th century a group that accounted for 10 to 15 percent of immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1920 challenging and revising common assumptions concerning the ease of their initial adaptation and image as a model immigrant minority. Lederhendler demonstrates that the characteristics for which Jewish immigrants are commonly known their industriousness middle-class domestic habits and political sympathy for the working class were in fact developed in response to their new situation in the United States. This experience realigned Jewish social values and restored to these immigrants a sense of status honor and a novel kind of social belonging and with it the social capital needed to establish a community quite different from the ones they came from.