Breaking the Taboo: Investigating the Complex History of Jews and the American Economy

Abstract

Breaking the Taboo:Investigating the Complex History of Jews and the American Economy Rebecca Kobrin (bio) "History is useful" when thinking about America's economy, Ben Bernanke stressed to me as he leaned back in a swivel chair, looking considerably more relaxed than he was in 2008, when the world got to know him as the person responsible for keeping the American financial system afloat.1 For all the attention devoted then and since to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers—the proximate cause of the cascading crisis in 2008—few have recalled that firm's long history as a Jewish immigrant family business, founded by Bavarian Jews who immigrated to plantation Alabama 160 years ago. Indeed, the fact that a grandson of East European Jewish immigrants—who also hailed from the South—was at the helm of the governmental regulatory body responsible to address the crisis facing one of the oldest Jewish investment banks, speaks to the important, though yet to be fully understood role that Jews played in the 2008 crisis. This history will be written one day. But as this volume demonstrates, the earlier history of Jewish involvement in the American economy still needs attention. Tales of Jews' economic endeavors fill the pages of many American Jewish history books, but few have fully analyzed the "collective memory" conveyed of American Jewish economic life conveyed through these stories. As economist Robert Schiller recently pointed out in his work on "narrative economics": popular stories affect individual and collective economic behavior.2 How can we ascertain more precisely what factors and variables shaped Jews' encounters as they engaged, challenged, failed, reformulated, and reshaped the American economy? What has been the role of Jews in the historic development of different aspects of the American economy? Almost a decade ago this question prompted the editorial board of this journal to embrace the idea of devoting a special issue to Jews and the American economy. Despite the centrality of capitalism to the United States, and the fact that this country has been home to one of the globe's largest Jewish populations since the early twentieth century, the relationship between [End Page 393] Jews and American capitalism has been a somewhat avoided topic. Few scholars have devoted themselves to exploring how Jews have molded the development of America's economy, and, in turn, how the American economy's shifting paths have shaped Jews. How have Jews engaged with and integrated themselves into various niches and spaces of the US economy?? How did the particular economic development of the United States and its embrace of capitalism shape the lives of millions of Jews who have called it home? How did America's economy shape the practice of Judaism itself? And what can focusing on economic history teach us about Jewish history, or thinking about Jews illuminate about American economic history? Even as academic Jewish studies have expanded dramatically in the past half-century, these questions have not been interrogated to the degree they deserve. As Jerry Mueller notes, "the relationship of the Jews to capitalism"—or as I would say, Jews to American economic developments and practices—has "received less attention than its significance merits."3 To be sure, there were pioneers of the field, most notably, Nobel-prize winner Simon Kuznets. His groundbreaking 1975 article, "Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States," is still widely cited and assigned today. Indeed, the "data and rigorous analyses" of that article debunked many myths concerning East European migration, even as it laid down new frameworks to study group identity, immigration streams, and economic structures.4 Another economist, Arcadius Kahan, also collected data in the 1970s relating to Jewish labor in the United States in order to understand the encounter of Jews with the American economy. His insightful research on Eastern European Jewish immigrants and the American labor market before 1914 still influences how economists think about immigrant mobility in early-twentieth century America.5 The fact that scholars still return to and cite the studies these scholars produced in the 1970s speaks both to the importance of their findings and to the paucity of sustained scholarship on this topic written by [End Page 394] social scientists...