The Volokh Conspiracy - "The Jewish Americans":

I haven't been watching this PBS documentary series (mostly because I don't watch t.v.), but a q & a with the writer/director raises a question. He writes, "Jewish Americans are probably the most liberal of any white ethnic group, and that liberalism dates from this deep attachment to F.D.R., the New Deal and the liberal principles for which both stood."

Hmm. My understanding of American Jewish history is rather different. As I understand it, many Eastern European Jews brought labor radicalism and socialism with them to America, and a substantial fraction, perhaps as much as 1/3, of American Jews (which would have included my own maternal grandfather and great-grandfather) identified themselves as socialists in 1932, before F.D.R.'s presidency could have had any impact on them. If anything, F.D.R. probably made American Jews less liberal (in the American political sense) by weaning many of them away from socialism and other forms of radicalism and into New Deal interest group liberalism, though he did win Jews' loyalty to the Democratic Party.

If we have any readers who are experts in American Jewish history or sociology, perhaps they will chime in.

On another topic, why is it a "darker corner of Jewish history" that "Jews owned many of the sweatshops [otherwise known as small, poorly capitalized factories] on the Lower East Side"? Is there some evidence that "sweatshop" owners made super-competitive profits because they had monopoly power or coerced their workers? That they failed to pay agreed-upon wages? That they received special favors from political connections? Am I the only one who has read The Rise of David Levinsky and wondered why the title character was considered a heinous villain in his day?

	[David Bernstein, January 22, 2008 at 7:50pm] Trackbacks "The Jewish Americans": I haven't been watching this PBS documentary series (mostly because I don't watch t.v.), but a q & a with the writer/director raises a question. He writes, "Jewish Americans are probably the most liberal of any white ethnic group, and that liberalism dates from this deep attachment to F.D.R., the New Deal and the liberal principles for which both stood." Hmm. My understanding of American Jewish history is rather different. As I understand it, many Eastern European Jews brought labor radicalism and socialism with them to America, and a substantial fraction, perhaps as much as 1/3, of American Jews (which would have included my own maternal grandfather and great-grandfather) identified themselves as socialists in 1932, before F.D.R.'s presidency could have had any impact on them. If anything, F.D.R. probably made American Jews less liberal (in the American political sense) by weaning many of them away from socialism and other forms of radicalism and into New Deal interest group liberalism, though he did win Jews' loyalty to the Democratic Party. If we have any readers who are experts in American Jewish history or sociology, perhaps they will chime in. On another topic, why is it a "darker corner of Jewish history" that "Jews owned many of the sweatshops [otherwise known as small, poorly capitalized factories] on the Lower East Side"? Is there some evidence that "sweatshop" owners made super-competitive profits because they had monopoly power or coerced their workers? That they failed to pay agreed-upon wages? That they received special favors from political connections? Am I the only one who has read The Rise of David Levinsky and wondered why the title character was considered a heinous villain in his day?