Rachel Swed
Reflection 3 of 5
Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community by: Jenna Weissman Joselit
(written in winter 1983)
In her book Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, Jenna Weissman Joselit thoroughly discusses Jewish immigration. Throughout history, Jews were known for being law-abiding citizens. They were the most peaceful, and there was only a record of two murders that were committed by those who identified with the notoriously untroubling group in the past 250 years (1). However, as the number of immigrants kept increasing, Americans grew highly fearful that their country would soon be corrupted by criminals, pickpockets, and thieves. Nativist believed that the government was too lenient with their immigration policies, claiming there were more immigrants than Americans. In addition, there were a lot of disorders such as, an increase in crime, and the economy’s plummeting wealth. In the eyes of an anti-immigrant partisan, these deficiencies were held at the responsibility of immigrants because prior to the surge of incomers, Americans weren’t familiar with facing such issues. As a result, a coalition formed towards pushing legislative actions to establish quotas to limit the number of immigrants coming, more specifically Jewish people. However, even after they established the quota there was no proof that immigrants were the reason for the increase in crime. Nevertheless, the book goes on to describe how the Lexow Committee uncovered the criminal element of the Jewish community that ranged from different crimes of pickpocketing to prostitution (with or without the consent of the women) and gambling. The revelations of Jewish criminality startled many of the community, and this cast a horrible light on Jewish people. Once viewed as a group of high moral standing, the Jewish community was now seen as a corrupted group and were targets of discrimination and hatred.
This book fits into the theme of this week which is inclusion and exclusion because the Jews were excluded. At first, the Jews were upstanding citizens and were doing nothing wrong but the government still decided to exclude them and decided to limit the number of immigrants that came from Europe, where a majority of them originated, which is not only anti-immigration, but also very anti-semitic and extremely discriminatory. This also connects to what we were discussing in class about the multiple legislative laws that were passed to limit the number of specific ethnicities of immigrants coming into the United States. Specifically, this book and Guarding the Golden Door both bring up a good point of specific ethnic groups being targeted and discriminated against. In Guarding the Golden Door, Chinese immigrants were prohibited entry to the United States due to the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act and in Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community Jews coming from Europe were also on the receiving end of unfair treatment.
Joselit did a spectacular job at stating the story of the Jews in New York. However, as a reader, one question that ran through my mind was the basis of this book and knowing the validity of the crimes and illegal acts committed by the Jewish community. The author shows us newspaper articles, but the newspaper articles could be biased against Jews so the readers do not know if they are accurate. Furthermore, the book only discusses Jews in New York (which I understand is the focus of this class) but does not show how Jews were around the whole world. How the Jews acted in New York could have been because they were desperate for money and also as a result of being dislocated. If not for this disadvantage, they could have been upstanding citizens. My overall opinion of the book is that I believe it is a total attack on Jews and I did not enjoy the way the book was written because it sounded very subjective and discriminatory.
Questions:
- Why did they target Jews if they were nothing but law-abiding citizens in the beginning?
- If the government saw that the crimes were a result of poverty why didn’t they help the Jews?
