Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920
From Caste to Class

Eli Lederhendler demonstrates that the Russian Jewish immigrants' distinctive characteristics were developed through a realignment of Jewish social values in response to their new experiences.

Eli Lederhendler (Author)

9780521513609, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 March 2009

248 pages, 7 b/w illus. 1 map 7 tables
23.6 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.45 kg

'Eli Lederhendler's new book is ambitious and provocative. It ask us to rethink the mass migration of East European Jews to the United States, their encounter with American capitalism, and their subsequent integration into the middle class. Refreshingly, Lederhendler questions the utility of invoking formulas centered on identity politics and urges us to instead reconsider the impact of material circumstances on immigrant life. This is a bracing challenge to the cultural studies approach to ethnicity and immigration.' Todd M. Endelman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Eli Lederhendler's Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: 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.

Prologue
1. Down and out in eastern Europe
2. Being an immigrant: ideal, ordeal, and opportunities
3. Becoming an (ethnic) American: from class to ideology
Afterword.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Jewish studies [JFSR1], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History of the Americas [HBJK]