Class Conscious Workers as Immigrant Entrepreneurs: The Ambiguity of Class among Eastern European Jewish Immigrants to the United States at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The early twentieth century saw a large influx of Jewish immigrant population into the United States. The immigrant Jewish population simultaneously held two contradictory ideological dispositions: that of working class militancy underlined by collectivistic ideologies and that of entrepreneurship underlined by individualistic ideologies respectively. Anecdotal evidence and findings from autobiographies show that these apparently conflicting inclinations arose from this population's ambivalent attitudes towards class and their ambiguous experiences of it. This ambivalence is reflected in a number of Jewish immigrants moving back and forth between wage work and business enterprise and in turn gave rise to ambivalence in consciousness concerning social class. This contradictory mix of working class ambitions and working class politics has deep roots in American Jewish experiences dating back to the early years of immigration. It has a profound effect on this immigrant population's thinking about social inequality and conflict, combined with the persistence of a socialist based pro-labor attitude in entrepreneurial and professional middle class immigrant population. (VRS)