General Reference: Non-fiction on Jews and Crime in the U.S., including synopses of the following works:

Abadinsky, Howard, (Organized Crime [11^th edition, Cengage Learning] [hc,, 2016] 978-1305633711 [pb, 2020] 978-0357670880 [See the section in this book on Jewish organized crime in NY.]

Abramovsky, Abraham & Jonathan I. Edelstein, “The Drug War and the American Jewish Community: 1880 to 2002 and Beyond,” Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 6 (2002)

Adin, Mariah, “The Supreme Adventure: Brooklyn’s Thrill-Kill Gang and Mid Century Juvenile Justice,” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Albany, 2013)

Adler, Polly, (A House Is Not A Home) [hc, Rinehart & Co., 1953] B08WJQN74W [pb, U. of Massachusetts Press, 2006] 978-1558495593 [See related film] [“A self-consciously literary work, A House Is Not a Home provides an informal social history of immigrant mobility, prostitution, Jewish life in New York, police dishonesty, the “white slavery” scare of the early twentieth century, and political corruption.” - Amazon] See also the entry on the 1964 film adaptation of this book, in the companion Filmography.

4.2.1 Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews

Alexander, Michael, (Jazz Age Jews [hc, Princeton UP, 2003]) 978-0691086798 [pb] 978-0691116532 [- examines how American Jews in the 1920s negotiated the paradox of rapid social success while continuing to see themselves as outsiders. Michael Alexander argues that, although the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants had achieved unprecedented economic, political, and cultural acceptance, many consciously identified with marginalized people and causes rather than embracing full assimilation. He contends that this enduring sense of outsiderhood was rooted not simply in anti-Semitism but in a deeply ingrained Jewish historical consciousness shaped by centuries of exile.

To develop this argument, Alexander centers the book on three emblematic figures:

• Arnold Rothstein, the legendary gambler and alleged organizer of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, illustrates Jewish attitudes toward wealth, gambling, and respectability. Alexander questions the traditional claim that Rothstein masterminded the World Series fix while exploring why many Jews admired a man widely viewed by the broader public as a criminal.
• Felix Frankfurter, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice, serves as the political case study through his prominent defense of Sacco and Vanzetti. His advocacy reflected what Alexander sees as a broader Jewish inclination to champion outsiders and victims of perceived injustice.
• Al Jolson, whose performance in The Jazz Singer helped inaugurate the era of talking pictures, represents the cultural dimension. Alexander examines the complex symbolism of Jolson’s use of blackface, arguing that many American Jews identified with African Americans as fellow outsiders while simultaneously seeking acceptance within mainstream society.

Drawing on Yiddish newspapers, legal records, popular culture, and contemporary commentary, Alexander challenges conventional interpretations that portray Jewish integration as a straightforward march toward assimilation. Instead, he presents the Jazz Age as a period in which American Jews simultaneously entered the mainstream and cultivated an identity based on solidarity with outsiders, a pattern that helped shape later traditions of Jewish liberalism and social activism.

The book has significant relevance to the theme of Jews and crime. Roughly one-third of the volume focuses on Arnold Rothstein, Jewish gambling, organized crime, and the public image of Jewish criminality in the 1920s. Alexander is less interested in criminal enterprises themselves than in what Rothstein’s celebrity reveals about American Jewish identity and the community’s complicated relationship to figures who operated outside respectable society. The work is therefore an important scholarly study for anyone interested in the intersection of Jewish identity, crime, and American culture during the Jazz Age. – ChatGPT]

Amir, Menachem, “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview”, Issues in Criminology, Vol. 6, No. 2 (SUMMER 1971), pp. 1-39

Applegate, Debby, (Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age [hc, Doubleday, 2021]) 978-0385534758 [pb, Anchor, 2022] 978-0307744128

Argersinger, Jo Ann E., (Making the Amalgamated: gender, ethnicity, and class in the Baltimore clothing industry, 1899–1939) [hc, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999] 978-0801859892

Arons, Ron (The Jews of Sing Sing: Gotham Gangsters and Gonuvim [hc, Barricade Books 2008]) 978-1569803332 [pb, 2016] 978-1569801536

4.2.2 Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York

Asbury, Herbert, (The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld [first published in 1928 by Alfred A. Knopf, hc, Wisehouse Classics, 2023]) 978-9180306096 [pb, Wisehouse Classics, 2023] 978-9180306089 [ - charts nearly a century of lawlessness, vice, and political corruption in New York City. Spanning from the Revolutionary War era to the early 20th century, journalist Herbert Asbury maps out the evolution of the city’s criminal underbelly before the modern Mafia took over during Prohibition. While chronicling the 19th-century Irish and Nativist factions, the latter portion of the book focuses extensively on the rise of Jewish criminals and street gangs on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe surged toward the turn of the 20th century, the neighborhood’s extreme poverty birthed powerful Jewish syndicates that altered the landscape of New York’s underworld.

The most prominent Jewish presence in the book is the Eastman Gang, led by the legendary Monk Eastman (born Edward Osterman). Under Eastman’s leadership, this primarily Jewish-American gang grew into a massive army of over 1,200 pickpockets, thugs, and thieves. Asbury documents their brutal, bloody turf wars against the Italian-dominated Five Points Gang, led by Paul Kelly. This rivalry culminated in the famous 1903 Rivington Street pitched battle, which required a massive police intervention to break up. Asbury famously describes Eastman as a scarred, terrifying brawler who oddly loved animals, frequently operating a pet shop front and walking around with a club and several cats.

Asbury traces how the disorganized street fighters of the 19th century evolved into sophisticated, modern criminals. He highlights several Jewish figures who dominated the city’s vice and extortion rackets before and during Prohibition: “Dopey” Benny Fein, a Jewish gang leader who pioneered the concept of labor racketeering in New York, hiring out muscle to both labor unions and employers during strikes; Nathan “Kid Dropper” Kaplan, a notorious Lower East Side Jewish gangster who led a fierce war for control of labor racketeering against rival Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen; “Gyp the Blood” (Harry Horowitz), a ruthless Jewish hitman and co-leader of the Lenox Avenue Gang, infamous for his involvement in the 1912 murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal.

Asbury wraps up the book’s look at the early 20th century by pointing to Arnold Rothstein, who transformed Jewish street crime into a multi-million-dollar corporate enterprise. Asbury notes that Rothstein effectively bridged the gap between the rough street gangs of the past and the sophisticated, organized crime syndicates that came to dominate the Prohibition era. [Google/AI]

Auerbach, Patrick, (Mafia Lucky Luciano Meyer Lansky & Bugsy Siegel: The Life And Crimes Of Notorious Gangsters Charles Lucky Luciano Meyer Lansky & Benjamin Bugsy Siegel [pb, independently published, 2023]) 979-8385714803

Bell, Daniel, “Crime as an American Way of Life,” The Antioch Review 13, no. 2 (1953), and later included in Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, with “The Resumption of History in the New Century”  [pb, second edition, Harvard UP, 2000] 978-0674004269 [understanding crime as one avenue of adaptation and upward mobility for American immigrant groups, e.g. Jews]

4.2.3 Michael Benson, Gangsters vs. Nazis

Benson, Michael, (Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in WW2 Era America [hc, Citadel Press, 2022]) 978-0806541792 [pb, 2024] 978-0806541808 - recounts the little-known campaign by Jewish organized crime figures to disrupt and intimidate pro-Nazi organizations in the United States during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Drawing on FBI files, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and previous historical studies, Benson focuses on the efforts of Jewish mob leaders—especially Meyer Lansky—who, at the request of Jewish community leaders and anti-fascist activists, organized teams of toughs to break up rallies, assault Nazi organizers, and undermine groups such as the German American Bund.

The book traces these activities in cities including New York, Newark, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It describes how figures such as Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, and other Jewish gangsters used violence and intimidation to prevent Nazi groups from gaining confidence or public visibility. Benson argues that, while these campaigns did not eliminate American fascism, they disrupted recruitment, demoralized supporters, and demonstrated that Nazi provocations would meet determined resistance.

Beyond the action-oriented narrative, Benson places these events in the broader context of widespread antisemitism in Depression-era America, the rise of fascist sympathies, and the reluctance of many public officials to intervene forcefully against pro-Nazi organizations before the United States entered World War II. He contrasts the willingness of underworld figures to act with the caution of many mainstream Jewish organizations, which generally feared that overt confrontation would provoke further antisemitism.

The book also examines the moral ambiguities involved. Benson does not romanticize the mobsters; he acknowledges that they remained violent criminals engaged in racketeering, gambling, and other illegal enterprises. Instead, he argues that their anti-Nazi activities represent an unusual historical episode in which criminal organizations temporarily served a cause widely regarded as morally justified.

The book has been well received as an engaging and thoroughly researched work of popular history. It is generally regarded as factually reliable, drawing heavily on earlier scholarship by historians such as Robert A. Rockaway and on contemporary documentation. However, it is not an academic monograph and sometimes dramatizes events for narrative effect. For scholarly purposes, it is best read alongside Rockaway’s work—particularly But He Was Good to His Mother and his Tablet essay “Gangsters vs. Nazis”—which provide more detailed historical analysis and documentation. See their details in this bibliography. – ChatGPT]

Wendy H. Bergoffen, “Guardians, millionaires, and fearless fighters: transforming Jewish gangsters into a usable past,” Shofar 25, no. 3 (2007): 91

Berman, Susan, (Easy Street: The Story of a Mob Family) [hc, Dial Press, 1981] 978-0385271851 [pb, Bantam Books, 1983] 978-0553229356 [See Cathy Scott book on Susan Berman, below in this Bibliography]

4.2.4 Stephen Birmingham, The Rest of Us

Birmingham, Stephen, (The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews [hc, Little, Brown & Co., 1984]) 978-0316096478 [pb, Syracuse UP, 1999] 978-0815606147 [- traces the experience of the nearly two million Jews who immigrated from the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe between roughly 1881 and 1915. Unlike his earlier books on Sephardic (The Grandees) and German-Jewish (Our Crowd) elites, this volume focuses on the poorer, Yiddish-speaking immigrants who transformed American Jewish life and, in many ways, American society itself.

Rather than presenting a conventional social history, Birmingham tells the story through vivid biographical sketches of representative figures. He begins with the immigrants’ arrival in New York’s Lower East Side, describing the overcrowded tenements, sweatshops, labor struggles, political radicalism, and intense drive for education and economic advancement. He explores the tensions between these newcomers and the earlier, more assimilated German-Jewish establishment, which often viewed the Eastern Europeans as uncultured and overly traditional.

As the narrative progresses, Birmingham follows the remarkable upward mobility of the immigrant generation and their children. His subjects include entrepreneurs, entertainers, politicians, labor leaders, financiers, and cultural figures such as Irving Berlin, Samuel Goldwyn, Helena Rubinstein, David Sarnoff, and Samuel Bronfman. He also includes less respectable but historically significant personalities—notably Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel—to illustrate the breadth of Jewish participation in American life, including organized crime. Rather than treating gangsters as representative, Birmingham presents them as one strand within the broader story of immigrant adaptation and ambition.

The book concludes by examining the postwar generation, showing how Eastern European Jews moved from urban immigrant neighborhoods into the American middle and upper classes while maintaining varying degrees of Jewish identity. Birmingham argues that within only a few generations, these once-impoverished immigrants reshaped American commerce, entertainment, politics, and culture, completing one of the most successful immigrant stories in U.S. history.

Although the book is primarily a broad social history rather than a study of crime, it contains useful material on Jewish organized crime through its discussions of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Birmingham treats them as part of the spectrum of Eastern European Jewish immigrant experience, alongside far more numerous examples of achievement in legitimate business, culture, and public life. – ChatGPT]

Block, Alan A., “Aw! Your mother’s in the mafia: Women criminals in progressive New York,” Contemporary Crises 1 (1977)

Block, Alan A., “The snowman cometh: Coke in progressive New York,” Criminology 17 no. 1 (1979)

Block, Alan A., (East Side, West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930–1950), [hc, University College, 1980] 978-0901426994 [pb, Routledge, 1983] 978-0878559312 [hc, Routledge, 2017] 978-1138522558

Borovitz, Mark & Alan Eisenstock, (The Holy Thief: A Con Man’s Journey from Darkness to Light – An Uplifting Memoir: From Mobster to Rabbi [hc, William Morrow, 2004] 978-0060563790 [pb, William Morrow, 2005] 978-0060563806 [The memoir of a remarkable man, a true-life gangster story, a passionate love story, and a case study in redemption. Mark Borovitz proved that you can change your life -- profoundly. He is now the rabbi at Beit T’Shuvah in Los Angeles, the House of Return, a rehabilitation facility for addicts of all kinds. – Amazon]

Brett, Mia, “The Murdered Jewess: Jewish Immigration and the Problem of Citizenship in the Courtroom in Late 19th-Century New York,” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, State University of New York, 2020)

Cohan, Hillary. (Growing Up Jewish In The Mob) [pb, CreateSpace Independent, 2013] 9781491055229

4.2.5 Rich Cohen, Tough Jews

Cohen, Rich, (Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams [pb, Vintage, 1999] 978-0375705472 [- a narrative history and cultural memoir that examines the rise of Jewish organized crime in the United States, especially in New York City during the 1920s–1940s. Cohen reconstructs the story of the Jewish gangsters who emerged from the immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn’s Brownsville and other urban Jewish enclaves during the early twentieth century. At the center of the book are figures such as Meyer Lansky, Benjamin Siegel, and, above all, Abe Reles, the feared hitman and later government informant associated with Murder, Inc.

Rather than presenting these gangsters simply as criminals, Cohen explores them as products of a particular historical moment. He argues that many second-generation Jewish immigrants, raised amid poverty, antisemitism, and ethnic conflict, embraced violence and criminality as a means of asserting power and rejecting the stereotype of the weak, passive Jew. The gangsters became, in Cohen’s telling, a distorted form of Jewish self-assertion in America.

Interwoven with the historical narrative is Cohen’s personal reflection on growing up as the grandson of Jewish immigrants. He investigates why stories of Jewish gangsters fascinated later generations of American Jews and how these figures became part of a broader mythology of Jewish masculinity. The book contrasts the criminal world of the gangsters with the more respectable paths pursued by their descendants and by postwar American Jewry.

Major Themes

• Jewish immigration and urban ethnic life in New York.
• The relationship between antisemitism and the emergence of Jewish street gangs.
• Constructions of Jewish masculinity and toughness.
• Organized crime as a route to power and social mobility.
• The transformation of American Jewish identity after World War II.
• Memory, nostalgia, and the mythology of the Jewish gangster.

Tough Jews helped popularize the history of Jewish organized crime for a broad readership. While some historians criticized Cohen for romanticizing gangsters and overstating their representative significance, the book remains one of the most influential and widely read accounts of Jewish gangsters in America. It is frequently cited in discussions of Jews and crime, Jewish masculinity, immigrant history, and the cultural legacy of figures such as Lansky and Murder, Inc.

Cohen explicitly notes that the Jewish gangsters of the Prohibition and Depression eras largely “went legit.” The book can also be read as a narrative account of the transition from street and organized crime to legitimate business and professional careers among later generations. - ChatGPT]

Conway, J. North, (Queen of Thieves: The True Story of “Marm” Mandelbaum and Her Gangs of New York [hc, Skyhorse Publishing, 2014]) 978-1629144351

Davis, Marni, (Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition [2012]) [hc, NYU Press] 978-0814720288 [pb, 2014] 978-1479882441

Deitche, Scott M., (Garden State Gangland: The Rise of the Mob in New Jersey [hc, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017] 978-1442267299 [pb, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019] 978-1538129777

Donovan, Brian and Tori Barnes-Brus, “Narratives of sexual consent and coercion: Forced prostitution trials in progressive-era New York City,” Law & Social Inquiry 36, no. 3 (2011)

Downey, Patrick, (Gangster City: The History of the New York Underworld, 1900–1935 [hc, Barricade Books, 2004]) 978-1569802670 [pb, Barricade Books, 2009] 978-1569803615

Farrell, Ronald and Carole Case, (The Black Book and the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada’s Casinos [hc, U. of Wisconsin Press, 1995]) 978-0299147501 [pb, U. of Wisconsin Press, 1995] 978-0299147549

Foner, Philip Sheldon, (The Fur and Leather Workers Union: The Story of Dramatic Struggles and Achievements [hc, Nordan Press, 1950; Literary Licensing LLC, 2013]) 978-1258789541 [pb, Literary Licensing LLC, 2013] 978-1258793562

Fournier, Gregory A., (The Elusive Purple Gang: Detroit’s Kosher Nostra [pb, Wheatmark, 2019]) 978-1627877145

Fox, Margalit, (The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss [hc, Random House, 2024]) 978-0593243855 [pb, 2025] 978-0593243879

Fox, Stephen R., (Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America) [hc, William Morrow,1989]) 978-0688043506 [pb, Penguin, 1990] 978-0140134384 [broad survey including Jewish role in developing organized crime]

4.2.6 Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America

Fried, Albert, (The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America [hc, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980]) 978-0030213717 [pb, Columbia UP, revised edition, 1994] 978-0231096836 [ - one of the pioneering scholarly histories of Jewish organized crime in the United States. Drawing on police records, court documents, newspapers, memoirs, and contemporary accounts, Fried traces the development of Jewish criminal organizations from the immigrant neighborhoods of the late nineteenth century to their decline after World War II.

The book begins with the overcrowded Jewish districts of New York’s Lower East Side and similar immigrant neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit. Fried argues that the same social conditions that produced successful entrepreneurs, labor leaders, and politicians also produced a small but highly visible criminal underworld. Early gang leaders such as Monk Eastman, “Dopey” Benny Fein, and Big Jack Zelig emerged from street gangs, gambling, prostitution, labor racketeering, and political corruption before the advent of Prohibition.

Prohibition transformed Jewish gangsters into major figures in organized crime. Fried examines the careers of Arnold Rothstein, Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer), Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and others, showing how they expanded from bootlegging into gambling, labor extortion, narcotics, and national criminal syndicates. A central theme is the close cooperation between Jewish and Italian mobsters, whose alliances helped create the modern American Mafia and the National Crime Syndicate.

The author also explores the public image of Jewish gangsters. He notes the discomfort of mainstream Jewish leaders, who feared that highly publicized criminality would fuel antisemitic stereotypes. At the same time, gangsters often cultivated reputations as benefactors within immigrant communities, donating to charities, supporting synagogues, or presenting themselves as protectors of fellow Jews. Fried treats these claims critically, distinguishing myth from documented reality.

The latter chapters describe the decline of the Jewish underworld after the Second World War. Greater social mobility, suburbanization, changing immigration patterns, and increasingly effective law enforcement reduced the prominence of Jewish organized crime. Many surviving Jewish mob figures retired, entered legitimate business, or ceded leadership to predominantly Italian-American crime families. The revised edition includes an afterword discussing the enduring cultural fascination with Jewish gangsters and their portrayal in later books and popular culture.

For anyone studying Jews and crime, Fried’s work remains a foundational survey. Although later scholarship has refined some of his interpretations and added new archival material, it is still regarded as one of the most authoritative general histories of Jewish organized crime in America and an indispensable starting point for the subject. – ChatGPT]

Garland, Libby, (After they closed the gates: Jewish illegal immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 [U. of Chicago Press]) [hc, 2014]  978-0226122458 [pb, 2018] 978-0226565224

Goldstein, Gary, (Jew in Jail [pb, Createspace Independent, 2010]) ‎ 978-1452864341 [personal account of author’s nearly six years of incarceration in NY state and transition from various addictions to eventual author and motivational speaker]

Goodman, Oscar, with George Anastasia, (Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas [hc, Hachette Books, 2013]) 978-1602861886 [pb, Grand Central Publishing, 2014] 978-1602862333

Goren, Arthur, (New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehilla Experiment, 1908–1922) [hc, Columbia UP, 1970] 978-0231034227 [pb, Columbia UP, 1979] 978-0231083683 [extensive coverage of crime in pre-WW1 Jewish community and the response to it]

Gorenstein, Nathan, (Tommy Gun Winter: Jewish Gangsters, a Preacher’s Daughter, and the Trial That Shocked 1930s Boston [hc, ForeEdge, 2015]) 978-1611684261

Gudefin, Geraldine, “‘Should I go to other Rabbis . . . or should I go to court’: Eastern European Jewish women and Marital Litigation, 1900–1920,” American Jewish History 106, no. 1 (2022)

Hall, Aaron, (A Gangsters Guide: Frank Rosenthal [pb, independently published, 2025]) 979-8282604382 [Las Vegas/casinos/Mafia]

Hobsbawm, Eric J., “The Economics of the Gangster,” The Quarterly Review,  no. 604 (1955)

Imhoff, Sarah, (Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism [Indiana UP, 2017]) [hc] 978-0253026064 [pb] 978-0253026217

Jackson, Toby, “Hoodlum or Businessman: An American Dilemma,” in Marshall Sklare [ed], The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group (hc, The Free Press, 1958, B009NNL8PQ), pp. 542–550

Jobb, Dean, (Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation [Algonquin Books]) [hc,2015] 978-1616201753 [pb, 2016] 978-1616205355 [Ponzi scheme by Chicago Jewish lawyer]

4.2.7 Jenna Weissman Joselit, Our Gang

Joselit, Jenna Weissman, (Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900–1940 [hc, Indiana UP, 1983] 978-0253158451 [pb, 1983]) 978-0253203144 [Focusing on New York City between 1900 and 1940, Joselit explores both the Jewish underworld itself and how the organized Jewish community responded to the existence of Jewish criminals.

Her central argument is that Jewish crime was not an aberration outside Jewish life but developed within the same immigrant environment that produced respectable workers, entrepreneurs, labor activists, and communal leaders. Criminals emerged from the crowded immigrant neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and Brownsville and initially lived among the communities they exploited. Jewish crime was therefore a by-product of immigration, poverty, urbanization, and social mobility rather than a rejection of Jewish identity.

The Nature of Jewish Crime

The book traces a variety of criminal activities:

• Street gangs and juvenile delinquency on the Lower East Side.
• Theft, burglary, fencing, and labor racketeering.
• Gambling and prostitution.
• Organized crime associated with Prohibition-era bootlegging.
• The rise of nationally known Jewish gangsters during the 1920s and 1930s.

Joselit shows that Jewish criminals were often products of immigrant neighborhoods undergoing rapid social change. Criminal careers could offer an alternative route to economic success when legitimate opportunities seemed limited.

Community Reactions

One of the book’s most important contributions is its analysis of how New York’s Jewish leadership reacted to Jewish crime. Joselit describes a progression through several stages:

1. Disbelief and denial – Many Jewish leaders initially minimized reports of Jewish criminality because they feared reinforcing antisemitic stereotypes.
2. Concern and reform – As crime became more visible, communal organizations began studying the problem and creating preventive and rehabilitative programs.
3. Institutional response – Jewish charities, settlement houses, educational organizations, and correctional agencies attempted to redirect at-risk youth and aid offenders.
4. Acceptance and normalization – By the interwar period, as Jews became more economically secure and socially integrated, crime came to be viewed as a normal social problem affecting Jews just as it affected other ethnic groups.

Assimilation and the Underworld

A major theme is that Jewish crime followed the broader pattern of Jewish assimilation. Early criminal networks were strongly tied to immigrant neighborhoods and ethnic connections. Over time, however, Jewish gangsters became increasingly integrated into larger American criminal organizations. By the late 1930s, specifically Jewish forms of organized crime were fading as Jewish criminals were absorbed into the broader American underworld.

Historical Significance

The book challenges the long-standing myth that Jews were virtually absent from criminal activity. Joselit does not argue that Jews were disproportionately criminal; rather, she demonstrates that Jews participated in crime at rates and in forms typical of other immigrant groups undergoing urbanization and social mobility. Her work therefore normalizes Jewish history by showing that Jews experienced the full range of social phenomena found in other American ethnic communities.

Relevance to the Study of Jews and Crime

For scholars of Jewish crime, gangsters, and Jewish detective fiction, Our Gang is foundational because it:

• Provides a historical background to real Jewish criminality in New York.
• Explains communal anxieties about antisemitic stereotypes.
• Shows the transition from immigrant street gangs to organized crime.
• Documents the emergence of Jewish social-service and reform institutions.
• Places famous figures such as the Prohibition-era Jewish gangsters within a broader social history rather than treating them as isolated celebrities.

In short, Joselit’s book is less a history of gangsters than a history of the relationship between Jewish criminality and Jewish communal self-understanding. Its central insight is that the New York Jewish community’s response to crime reveals as much about Jewish immigration, acculturation, and identity formation as the criminals themselves. It also documents the forms of crime that largely disappeared after postwar upward mobility. - ChatGPT]

Joseph, Judith Lee Vaupen, “The Nafkeh and the Lady: Jewish Prostitutes and Progressives in New York City, 1900–1930” (PhD diss., State U. of New York at Stony Brook, 1986)

Katz, Daniel (All together different: Yiddish socialists, garment workers, and the labor roots of multiculturalism [hc, NYU Press, 2011]) 978-0814748367 [pb, NYU Press, 2013] 978-1479873258

Kavieff, Paul R., (Detroit’s Infamous Purple Gang [hc, Arcadia, 2008]) 978-1531632779 [pb] 978-0738552385

Keefe, Rose, (The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster [hc, Cumberland House, 2008]) 978-1581826029

Konigsberg, Eric, (Blood Relation: An Investigative Memoir of a Mafia Hit Man, Long-Hidden Family Secrets, and Jewish-American History [hc, Harper, 2005]) 978-0060099046 [pb, 2006] 978-0060099053 [about “Kayo” Konigsberg, Mafia hit man]

Kosak, Hadassa, (Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant Workers, New York City, 1881–1905 [hc, State University of New York Press, 2000]) 978-0791445839 [pb, SUNY Press, 2000] 978-0791445846

Larson, David, (The Last Jewish Gangster: The Early Years [hc, WildBlue Press, 2022]) 978-1957288239 [pb] 978-1957288222 [referring to Michael J. Hardy. He was the son of Shirley Rook, born Shirley Blaustein, a central figure characterized as the “Queen of New York City crime”. She was closely associated with Bugsy Siegel, who was Michael Hardy’s godfather. She rose to the top of the New York criminal ranks, where she laundered Mob money, managed the city’s largest bookmaking operation, and facilitated payouts to corrupt judges, politicians, and police officers. A major narrative arc in the books is her ultimate betrayal of Michael. Despite his lifelong efforts to win her approval—including serving time in a Mexican prison for her counterfeiting operation—she eventually turned him in to the authorities to save herself from a prison sentence. Crushed by his mother’s betrayal and facing a murder trial in 1991, Hardy cut a deal with Rudy Giuliani, agreeing to wear a wire to help the Feds take down corrupt police officers and marshals. He eventually enrolled in the Witness Security Program and relocated to Los Angeles under an alias. He found work there as “muscle” and a debt collector for a B-movie studio and even appeared in several films as a non-speaking background actor, effectively playing a version of himself. He wound up in San Diego being interviewed by David Larson starting in 2013, recounting his 26 years in prison, 11 shootings, and 19 killings while struggling with his legacy and his Jewish heritage. – Google/AI]

Larson, David, (The Last Jewish Gangster: The Middle Years [hc, WildBlue Press, 2022]) 978-1957288093 [pb] 978-1957288079 [The third volume of the trilogy, entitled The Later Years or The Final Years is for some reason unavailable in a print version. Its content is accessible in the Audiobook editions of the series. According to author David Larson, Hardy passed away in 2022. – Google/AI]

Lazar, Zachary, (Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder) [hc, Little, Brown, 2009]  978-0316037686 [pb, Back Bay Books, 2010] 978-0316037693 [re: Ed Lazar and Arizona land fraud]

Maccabee, Paul, (John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crook’s Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920–1936) [hc, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995] 978-0873513159 [pb, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995] 978-0873513166

Maddow, Rachel, (Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism [hc, Crown, 2023]) 978-0593444511 [pb, Crown 2025] 978-0593444511 [- charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.
 
That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection. At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court. None of it went as planned.
 
While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.
 
That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times. – Amazon]

Maller, Julius B., “Juvenile Delinquency among the Jews in New York,” Social Forces 10, no. 4 (1932)

Mays, Devi, “Becoming Illegal: Sephardi Jews in the Opiates Trade,” Jewish Social Studies 25, no. 3 (2020)

Mendelsohn, Adam D., (The Rag Race: How Jews sewed their way to success in America and the British Empire) [hc, NYU Press, 2014] 978-1479847181 [pb, NYU Press, 2016] 978-1479814381

Mensch, Jean Ulitz, “Social pathology in urban America: desertion, prostitution, gambling, drugs and crime among eastern European Jews in New York City between 1881 and World War I” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1983)

Merkowitz, David, “The Segregating City: Philadelphia’s Jews in the Urban Crisis, 1964–1984,” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 2010)

Messick, Hank, (The Silent Syndicate [hc, Macmillan, 1967] B0006BO3EC [pb, Commonwealth Book Co., 2021] 978-1948986366 [Cleveland Jewish crime syndicate, also active later in Las Vegas]

Michels, Tony, (A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York [hc, Harvard UP, 2005]) 978-0674019133 [pb, Harvard UP, 2009] 978-0674032439

Newton, Michael, (Mr. Mob: The Life and Crimes of Moe Dalitz [pb, McFarland, 2009] 978-0786435166

O’Kane, James M., (The Crooked Ladder: Gangsters, Ethnicity and the American Dream [pb, Routledge, 2002] 978-0765809940 [hc, Routledge, 2017] 978-1138534933

Pietrusza, David, (Gangsterland: A Tour Through the Dark Heart of Jazz-Age New York City [hc, Diversion Books, 2023]) 978-1635769890

Pinzer, Maimie, (The Maimie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute [pb, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1997]) 978-1558611436

Porrello, Rick, (Bombs, Bullets, and Bribes: the true story of notorious Jewish mobster Alex Shondor Birns [hc, self-published, 2020] 978-0966250824 [pb, 2019, Next Hat Press] 978-0966250848

Portnoy, Eddy, (Bad Rabbi: and other strange but true stories from the Yiddish press [hc, Stanford UP, 2017]) 978-0804797610 [pb] 978-1503604117 – See non-fiction section of International bibliography for synopsis.

Rein, Raanan & David M.K. Sheinin [eds], (Armed Jews in the Americas [hc, Brill, 2021] 978-9004462533 [A Jewish weapons manufacturer during the American Civil War, a Jewish-Canadian chair of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Board, and Jewish-Argentine guerrilla fighters—these are some of the individuals discussed in this 1st-of-its-kind volume. It brings together some of the best new works on armed Jews in the Americas. Links between Jews and their ties to weapons are addressed through multiple cultural, political, social, and ideological contexts, thus breaking down longstanding, stilted myths in many societies about Jews and weaponry. Anti-Semitism and Jewish self-defense, Jewish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and Jewish-American gangsters as ethnic heroes (chapter authored by Larry D. Gragg, who also wrote a biography of Bugsy Siegel) form part of the little-researched topic of Jews and arms in the Americas.]

Ribak, Gil, “The Jew Usually Left Those Crimes to Esau: The Jewish Responses to Accusations about Jewish Criminality in New York, 1908–1913”, AJS (association of Jewish Studies) Review, Volume 38, Issue 1, April 2014, pp. 1-28 [This paper centers on the scandals, street thugs, and vice rings that triggered massive public debates at the time. It focuses on Herman Rosenthal, a prominent Jewish gambler and underworld figure who was gunned down after exposing his corrupt partnership with NYPD Lieutenant Charles Becker. The hit on Rosenthal was carried out by Lower East Side Jewish street thugs—most notably Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, Jacob “Whitey Lewis” Seidenschner, Louis “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg, and Francesco “Dago Frank” Cirofici (who was Italian). The execution by these Jewish gunmen deeply shook the New York Jewish community, forcing leaders to confront visible proof of Jewish violent crime. The paper covers the era right before the “Labor Slugger Wars” exploded, highlighting early street gangs hired out as muscle, e.g. the Monk Eastman Gang: Though Eastman himself was imprisoned during part of this window, his heavily Jewish successor factions were actively running prostitution, gambling, and extortion rings on the East Side.: This era marked the rise of “Dopey” Benny Fein, one of the earliest pioneers of industrial labor racketeering who revolutionized hiring out thugs to garment unions.

Rather than glamorous bank robbers, the “gangsters” of this specific 1908–1913 window were often Maxims or operators of the “White Slavery” (prostitution) trade. Activists and muckrakers targeted the Independent Benevolent Association, a real-life mutual-aid society that was actually a front for Jewish pimps, brothel owners, and human traffickers operating out of the Lower East Side.

The title refers to a traditional Jewish mindset that physical, violent crimes were something “Gentiles” (Esau) did, while Jews (Jacob) were inherently non-violent. Ribak explores how the Jewish community, the Yiddish press, and the newly formed New York Kehillah scrambled to respond when figures like NYPD Commissioner Theodore Bingham publicly claimed that Jews were responsible for half the city’s crime. [Google/AI]

Riess, Steven A., “Sport and the American Jew: A Second Look,” American Jewish History 83, no. 1 (1995)

Rockaway, Robert A., “Hoodlum Hero: The Jewish Gangster as Defender of His People, 1919–1949”,  American Jewish History 82, no. 1 (1994)

Rockaway, Robert, “American Jews and Crime: An Annotated Bibliography,” American Studies International, Vol. 38, No. 1 (February 2000), pp. 26-41

Rockaway, Robert, “The Notorious Purple Gang: Detroit’s All-Jewish Prohibition Era Mob,” Shofar, Vol.20, No.1 (Fall 2001), 113-130.

4.2.8 Robert Rockaway, But He Was Good To His Mother

Rockaway, Robert, (But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters [pb, Gefen, originally published 1993, 2020]) 979-8664052619 [- challenges the popular stereotype that Jews were either uniquely law-abiding immigrants or, conversely, romanticized “tough Jews.” He argues that Jewish gangsters emerged from the same social conditions that produced criminal organizations among other immigrant groups: poverty, overcrowded urban neighborhoods, limited opportunities, and ethnic solidarity. Crime was not a Jewish phenomenon, but Jewish criminals participated in organized crime in ways similar to Irish and Italian counterparts.

The title comes from a familiar refrain used by relatives and neighbors to excuse notorious criminals: despite murder, extortion, and racketeering, “he was good to his mother.” Rockaway uses the phrase to illustrate the tension between family loyalty and criminal behavior. The book traces Jewish gangsters from street gangs on New York’s Lower East Side and similar immigrant neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, and Philadelphia. Many came from Eastern European Jewish immigrant families struggling to adapt to American life.

Rockaway shows how some young Jewish men used crime to gain wealth, status, and influence unavailable through conventional avenues. Activities included: gambling, labor racketeering, bootlegging during Prohibition, extortion, hijacking, murder-for-hire and loan-sharking .

A recurring theme is the existence of a substantial Jewish organized-crime network—sometimes called the “Kosher Nostra”—which worked alongside and sometimes competed with Italian-American syndicates. Jewish gangsters played important roles in national organized crime, particularly during Prohibition and the 1930s.

Among the gangsters profiled are Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Louis Buchalter, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, members of Detroit’s Purple Gang, and earlier gang leaders such as Jack Zelig and Jacob Orgen.

One of the book’s most interesting observations is that many gangsters remained strongly connected to Jewish family life. Some attended synagogue on holidays, supported parents financially, married within the Jewish community, and donated to Jewish charities while simultaneously engaging in violent criminal enterprises. This contradiction lies at the heart of Rockaway’s analysis.

Decline of Jewish Organized Crime

Rockaway argues that Jewish organized crime declined after World War II because:

• Jewish Americans achieved rapid upward social and economic mobility.
• Educational opportunities expanded.
• Residential dispersion weakened the ethnic urban neighborhoods that had nurtured gangs.
• Later generations entered professional and business careers rather than street crime.

By the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish participation in organized crime had largely diminished, while other forms of criminal activity increasingly came to dominate organized-crime networks.

The book is important because it treats Jewish gangsters as historical actors rather than folklore figures. Rockaway neither glorifies nor condemns them; instead, he places them within the broader history of American immigration, ethnicity, urban life, and organized crime. It remains one of the standard scholarly works on the history of the American Jewish underworld and the phenomenon often referred to as the “Kosher Nostra.” - ChatGPT]

Rockaway, Robert,“Gangsters vs. Nazis: How the Jewish mob fought American admirers of the Third Reich”, Tablet, July 3, 2020

Ronel, Natti & Y. Ben Yair, “Spiritual Criminology: The Case of Jewish Criminology,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 62, no. 7 (2018)

Rosen, Richard D., (Tough Luck: Sid Luckman, Murder, Inc., and the Rise of the Modern NFL [hc, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019]) 978-0802129444 [pb, Grove Press, 2020] 978-0802157362

Rosenzweig, Laura B., (Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles [hc, New York U. Press, 2017]) 978-1479855179 [This work draws directly from thousands of pages of archival documents to show how major Jewish movie moguls secretly financed the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC) to place moles inside American Nazi chapters.]

Ross, Ron, (Bummy Davis vs. Murder, Inc.: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Mafia and an Ill-Fated Prizefighter [hc, St. Martin’s Press, 2003]) 978-0312306380 [pb, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004] 978-0312335717 [pb, Bedell Books, 2014] 978-0615992877

4.2.9 Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles

Ross, Steven J., (Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America [hc, Bloomsbury USA, 2017]) 978-1620405628 [pb, Bloomsbury Adult, 2019] 978-1620405635 [- uncovers the largely forgotten history of Nazi and fascist activity in Southern California during the 1930s and early 1940s, and the clandestine Jewish-led intelligence network that worked to defeat it. Drawing on previously unknown archives, FBI records, court documents, and the papers of anti-Nazi activist Leon Lewis, Ross demonstrates that Los Angeles—home to Hollywood, a large German-American population, and major defense industries—was regarded by Nazi Germany as a strategically important center for propaganda, espionage, and sabotage.

At the heart of the book is Leon Lewis, a Jewish attorney, World War I veteran, and early leader of the Anti-Defamation League, who organized one of America’s first civilian counterintelligence operations. Beginning in 1933, Lewis recruited German-Jewish refugees, anti-Nazi Christians, military veterans, and several courageous women to infiltrate organizations such as the German-American Bund, the Friends of New Germany, the Silver Shirts, and other fascist groups. Operating at enormous personal risk, these undercover agents rose through the ranks of extremist organizations, reporting on plans for anti-Jewish violence, industrial sabotage, and efforts to undermine American democracy.

Ross describes how the spy ring uncovered plots to assassinate prominent Jewish and Hollywood figures, attack Jewish neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights, sabotage military installations and aircraft factories, and prepare for a possible Nazi-backed seizure of power in the United States. Because the FBI and many local authorities initially devoted greater attention to communists than to fascists—and because some officials were themselves sympathetic to anti-Semitic organizations—Lewis’s independent intelligence network often became the country’s first line of defense against domestic Nazi conspiracies.

Combining meticulous historical research with the pace of an espionage thriller, Ross introduces a vivid cast of undercover operatives, Nazi organizers, Hollywood executives, politicians, and law-enforcement officials. He also explores the broader climate of American anti-Semitism, the vulnerability of democratic institutions during periods of economic and political crisis, and the determination of ordinary citizens who chose to resist fascism long before the United States entered World War II.

A finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History, Hitler in Los Angeles is widely regarded as an important contribution to both American Jewish history and the history of domestic extremism. It brings to light an extraordinary episode in which Jewish activists, operating largely without official support, successfully thwarted Nazi espionage and terrorist plots on American soil while helping to protect Hollywood, Southern California, and the broader United States from a serious internal threat. – ChatGPT]

4.2.10 Laurence Roth, Inspecting Jews

Laurence Roth (est. born 1965 and grew up in Los Angeles) - Professor of English at Susquehanna University, founder/director of its Jewish and Israel Studies Program., and editor of the journal, Modern Language Studies.

Roth, Laurence, (Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories [pb, Rutgers UP, 2003]) 978-0813533698

[Abstract- ChatGPT]: [In Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories, literary scholar Laurence Roth examines American Jewish detective fiction as a major site for negotiating Jewish identity, assimilation, memory, gender, and cultural belonging in the United States. Rather than treating detective novels as merely popular entertainment, Roth argues that they provide a revealing lens through which to understand the tensions of modern American Jewish life. The book studies how Jewish detective stories simultaneously embrace American popular culture and preserve distinct Jewish traditions, values, and anxieties. Roth calls this process “kosher hybridity,” a concept describing the attempt of Jewish Americans to be fully American while still remaining recognizably Jewish.

Roth situates Jewish detective fiction within the broader history of detective literature, emphasizing that the detective genre is fundamentally concerned with restoring order in a chaotic society. Because Jewish Americans historically occupied an ambivalent position within American culture—both insiders and outsiders—the detective story became an especially productive genre for expressing questions of identity, prejudice, assimilation, and cultural survival. Jewish detectives, rabbis, police officers, and amateur investigators are therefore not simply crime-solvers; they are symbolic figures navigating divided loyalties between Jewish communal traditions and secular American modernity.

The book is organized into thematic sections dealing with gender, memory, and alterity (“otherness”). Roth studies writers such as Harry Kemelman, Faye Kellerman, Stuart Kaminsky, and Rochelle Krich, among others. Through close readings of their works, he shows how Jewish detective fiction evolves from comic ethnic marginality into a sophisticated exploration of multicultural America.

One of Roth’s central arguments concerns masculinity and stereotypes of Jewish men. In early detective fiction, the classic detective hero was usually tough, masculine, and physically dominant—qualities historically denied to Jewish men in antisemitic stereotypes that depicted them as weak, intellectual, or feminized. Roth analyzes how Jewish detective fiction revises this model. For example, Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small solves crimes not through violence or hard-boiled toughness but through Talmudic reasoning, textual interpretation, and intellectual analysis. Roth argues that these stories redefine detective heroism in specifically Jewish terms: knowledge, interpretation, and ethical inquiry replace brute force. The “Jewish detective” therefore challenges dominant American ideals of masculinity while creating alternative forms of authority grounded in Jewish learning and moral discourse.

Roth also explores intermarriage and assimilation, especially in fiction where Jewish and non-Jewish identities overlap. Detective stories frequently portray Jewish characters moving between Jewish and Gentile worlds, highlighting anxieties about cultural dilution and social acceptance. The detective’s role as a mediator between communities mirrors the broader experience of American Jews navigating between ethnic particularism and national integration. Roth argues that these narratives neither fully reject assimilation nor fully celebrate separation. Instead, they dramatize the instability and ambiguity of hybrid identity in multicultural America.

A major contribution of the book is its discussion of Jewish women detectives and female Jewish investigators. Roth demonstrates that women characters complicate traditional detective formulas even further because they negotiate both gender expectations and ethnic identity. Female investigators in Jewish detective fiction often balance domesticity, religious tradition, professional ambition, and communal responsibility. Their investigations become not only criminal inquiries but also explorations of gendered Jewish identity in modern America. Roth suggests that these stories expose tensions between feminism and traditional Judaism while also expanding the possibilities of Jewish cultural representation.

Memory, especially Holocaust memory, forms another major theme. Roth argues that later Jewish detective fiction increasingly incorporates the Holocaust into crime narratives. In these works, solving crimes becomes linked to recovering suppressed histories and confronting collective trauma. The detective functions as a guardian of memory, uncovering hidden pasts that American society might prefer to ignore. Roth particularly notes how Holocaust-related detective stories blend historical trauma with popular genre conventions, creating what he calls “hard-boiled Holocaust” narratives. These works demonstrate that detective fiction can address profound historical and ethical questions while remaining accessible to mass audiences.

The book further examines Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewish identities, showing how detective fiction reflects internal diversity within American Jewish culture. Roth argues that Jewish detective stories do not present a unified Jewish experience; instead, they reveal tensions among different ethnic, religious, and ideological Jewish communities. The detective genre becomes a way of negotiating these differences while also exploring broader questions of multiculturalism and minority identity in America.

Another recurring concern is the theme of concealment and passing. Roth discusses stories involving “undercover Jews” and “undercover Gentiles,” where identity is hidden, ambiguous, or strategically performed. Such narratives dramatize the historical pressure on Jews to assimilate or conceal difference while also revealing the instability of ethnic categories themselves. Detective fiction, with its emphasis on hidden truths and mistaken identities, becomes an ideal genre for examining the performative aspects of Jewishness in American life.

Methodologically, Roth combines literary criticism, cultural studies, Jewish studies, and genre analysis. He treats detective fiction seriously as a cultural archive rather than dismissing it as formulaic popular literature. One important aspect of the study is his attention to readership and reception: the appendix includes an audience reception survey examining how readers interpret Jewish detective fiction. This allows Roth to argue that the genre actively shapes contemporary understandings of Jewish identity rather than merely reflecting preexisting realities.

Ultimately, Roth concludes that American Jewish detective stories are fundamentally about negotiation and mediation. They express the contradictions of Jewish American life: the desire for integration alongside the desire for distinctiveness; attraction to American secular modernity alongside attachment to Jewish ethics, religion, and communal memory. Detective fiction becomes a cultural laboratory where these tensions can be dramatized, tested, and partially reconciled. Through the recurring figure of the Jewish detective, these stories imagine ways of being simultaneously Jewish and American without fully dissolving either identity.

4.2.11 Rachel Rubin, Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature

Rachel Rubin (est. birth 1962) - a prominent scholar in American Studies, widely recognized for her work on the intersection of literature, music, and popular culture. Academic career at UMass, Boston. In Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature  (2000), Rachel Rubin explores how the figure of the Jewish gangster served as a powerful tool for left-wing Jewish writers to explore their own complex identities as outcasts in both the literary world and modern society. 

Rubin, Rachel, “Killer Jews”, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture (2001, Volume 8, Issue 2), a review-essay of Robert Rockaway, “But He Was Good To His Mother”. Rubin argues that the book misses critical insights by separating historical headlines from pop culture. She points out that real-world Jewish gangsters heavily influenced early cinema, noting how the bizarre death of gangster Samuel “Nails” Nathan (thrown from a horse, which his gang then shot in revenge) was faithfully re-created in the iconic 1931 film The Public Enemy. She addresses the long-standing anxiety within the Jewish-American community regarding public discussions of Jewish criminals. Both journalists and academic historians researching these figures have historically faced criticism for exposing a dark side of the immigrant experience.

The “Protector” Myth vs. Reality: Rubin breaks down the romanticized trope of Jewish gangsters serving as heroic “Defenders of Their People”. While some gangsters did protect their communities from antisemitic violence, Rubin highlights Rockaway’s evidence that these same criminals built their wealth by extorting and shaking down the vulnerable Jewish merchants and pushcart vendors in their own neighborhoods.

Rubin, Rachel, (Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature [hc, U. of Illinois Press, 2000]) 978-0252025396 [Note: See the entries on Ornitz, Gold and Fuchs in the companion bibliography, “U.S. Jewish Detectives, Spies, Criminals, et al – FICTION”, and on Babel in the companion bibliography, “International – Jewish Detectives, Spies, Criminals et al – Fiction and Non-Fiction”]

Abstract [from ChatGPT]: This book examines the figure of the Jewish gangster as a central symbol in interwar modernist literature and culture. It argues that Jewish writers on the political Left used the gangster figure not merely as a criminal stereotype, but as a powerful metaphor for artistic rebellion, ethnic transformation, masculinity, and cultural marginality in the modern age. Rubin places the Jewish gangster at the intersection of literature, politics, immigration, urban culture, and modernism, showing how criminality became a language through which Jewish writers explored their own uneasy entry into modern Western culture.

Rubin’s central thesis is that Jewish writers and artists between the 1920s and 1940s identified with the gangster because both occupied ambiguous positions inside and outside dominant society. The gangster, in her reading, symbolizes the outsider who breaks rules in order to gain entry into systems of power. Jewish modernist writers, especially those aligned with socialism or communism, saw themselves similarly “breaking into” elite literary culture while remaining socially and ethnically marginal. Rubin repeatedly emphasizes the parallel between artistic experimentation and criminal transgression: writers “kneebreak” their way into the canon just as gangsters force their way into economic and social systems.

The book focuses primarily on four major writers: Isaac Babel, Mike Gold, Samuel Ornitz and Daniel Fuchs.

The introduction, “The Dream of His Kingdom,” establishes the theoretical framework. Rubin argues that the Jewish gangster emerged in the early twentieth century as a specifically modern figure tied to immigration, urban capitalism, ethnic reinvention, and masculine performance. Earlier Jewish literary traditions often portrayed Jews as intellectual, weak, scholarly, or victimized. The gangster represented a dramatic reversal: physical, aggressive, sexualized, and economically assertive. Rubin interprets this transformation as part of a wider attempt by Jewish writers to reinvent Jewish identity under modern conditions. The gangster becomes both frightening and attractive because he rejects passivity and embodies mobility, risk, and self-invention.

The chapter on Babel’s Odessa Tales examines the gangster Benya Krik, one of modern literature’s most famous Jewish criminals. Rubin argues that Babel transforms the Odessa gangster into a mythic folk hero who combines brutality with theatricality and wit. Benya Krik is not simply a criminal; he is an artist-like figure who manipulates language, performance, and violence. Rubin shows how Babel links criminal power with storytelling itself. The gangster’s command over speech and legend parallels the writer’s power over narrative. At the same time, Babel’s work reflects anxieties about revolution, Jewish assimilation, and Soviet modernization. Rubin emphasizes how Babel merges Yiddish folklore, Russian literary modernism, and urban criminal mythology into a new hybrid Jewish aesthetic.

In her discussion of Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch Paunch and Jowl, Rubin explores how gangster imagery exposes tensions within immigrant Jewish culture. Ornitz depicts urban Jewish life as corrupt, commercialized, and morally unstable. Rubin argues that the novel presents criminality as inseparable from capitalist modernity itself. Gangsters thrive because American economic culture rewards aggression and exploitation. She also shows how Ornitz mixes realism with grotesque satire, using criminal figures to critique both bourgeois respectability and the commodification of ethnicity. Jewish culture becomes something that can be “plundered,” marketed, or manipulated.

The chapter on Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money is one of the book’s central analyses. Rubin examines Gold’s depiction of violent Jewish youth gangs on New York’s Lower East Side. She argues that Gold uses gangster figures to reject sentimental or assimilated representations of Jewish immigrants. His “tough Jews” embody rage against poverty, class oppression, and ethnic humiliation. Rubin connects this imagery to proletarian literature and communist politics of the 1930s. Gold presents criminality not simply as moral failure but as a distorted response to capitalism and social exclusion. Rubin also stresses the importance of vernacular language in Gold’s work: slang, Yiddish-inflected English, and street speech become tools of literary authenticity and rebellion.

Rubin’s chapter on Daniel Fuchs argues that his novels mark the decline or “death” of the Jewish gangster myth. Whereas earlier writers portrayed gangsters as energetic rebels or folk h eroes, Fuchs presents them as exhausted, tragic, and spiritually empty. His Brooklyn novels depict a world where the gangster no longer symbolizes liberation but entrapment within systems of money and violence. Rubin interprets this shift historically: by the late 1930s, the radical optimism associated with proletarian modernism had weakened, and Jewish writers became more skeptical about revolutionary transformation. The gangster loses his symbolic vitality and becomes merely another casualty of urban capitalism.

One of Rubin’s major contributions is her insistence that Jewish gangster narratives belong within modernist literary history. She challenges the tendency to separate “high modernism” from proletarian or ethnic writing. According to Rubin, left-wing Jewish writers experimented with language, fragmented identities, vernacular culture, and urban consciousness in ways fully comparable to canonical modernists. She therefore argues for expanding definitions of modernism to include immigrant, radical, and working-class Jewish literature.

Another important theme is masculinity. Rubin argues that the Jewish gangster helped create a new model of Jewish manhood that rejected stereotypes of weakness or passivity. Gangsters display toughness, sexual confidence, and physical force. Yet Rubin also notes the instability of this masculine ideal. The gangster is simultaneously powerful and insecure, admired and feared, assimilated and alienated. His unstable identity reflects broader tensions surrounding Jewish modernization and ethnic transformation in both the United States and Soviet Russia.

The book further explores language and vernacular culture. Rubin repeatedly emphasizes how these writers mixed Yiddish, slang, immigrant speech, and urban idioms into literary prose. The gangster’s speech becomes a marker of authenticity and rebellion against elite literary norms. Vernacular language itself functions like a criminal intrusion into respectable culture.

In the conclusion, “The Gangster’s Funeral,” Rubin traces the fading of the Jewish gangster as a central literary figure after World War II. As Jewish communities became more integrated into middle-class American life, the gangster lost much of his symbolic power. The rebellious outsider gave way to other Jewish archetypes: intellectuals, suburbanites, survivors, and professionals. Rubin suggests that the earlier gangster figure belonged specifically to the volatile world of immigration, radical politics, and interwar modernity.

Overall, the book argues that the Jewish gangster was never merely a sensational criminal stereotype. Rather, he functioned as a deeply ambivalent cultural symbol through which Jewish writers explored modernity itself: violence, capitalism, masculinity, artistic ambition, class rebellion, and ethnic reinvention. Rubin demonstrates that criminal figures helped Jewish modernists negotiate the contradictions of becoming modern while remaining outsiders to dominant culture.

Rubin, Rachel, “Gangster generation: crime, Jews and the problem of assimilation,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 20, no. 4 (2002): 9.

Rudensky, Red, Morris Rudensky & Don Riley, (The Gonif [hc, Piper Pub, 1970]) 978-0878320028

Sadowsky, Sandy, (Wedded to Crime: My Life in the Jewish Mafia [hc, Putnam, 1992]) 978-0399136146 [mass market pb, Berkeley, 1993] 978-0425137642

Sarna, Jonathan D., “Observations: The Jewish Way of Crime,” Commentary 78, no. 2 (1984): 55. [critique of Albert Fried book, listed above]

Scott, Cathy, Murder of a Mafia Daughter: The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Berman [hc, Barricade Books, 2002] 9781569802380 [Susan Berman (1945–2000), an American journalist and author, was the daughter of David “Davie” Berman, a Minneapolis mobster who took over the Flamingo Hotel after Bugsy Siegel’s 1947 gangland murder. She herself died as a victim of murder. See her memoir, “Easy Street” above in this Bibliography.]

Seligman, Scott D., The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City [hc, Potomac Books, 2020]) 978-1640123588 [pb, Potomac Books, 2023] 978-1640123588 [In the wee hours of May 15, 1902, three thousand Jewish women quietly took up positions on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Convinced by the latest jump in the price of kosher meat that they were being gouged, they assembled in squads of five, intent on shutting down every kosher butcher shop in New York’s Jewish quarter.

What was conceived as a nonviolent effort did not remain so for long. Customers who crossed the picket lines were heckled and assaulted and their parcels of meat hurled into the gutters. Butchers who remained open were attacked, their windows smashed, stock ruined, equipment destroyed. Brutal blows from police nightsticks sent women to local hospitals and to court. But soon Jewish housewives throughout the area took to the streets in solidarity, while the butchers either shut their doors or had their doors shut for them. The newspapers called it a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party.

The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 tells the twin stories of mostly uneducated women immigrants who discovered their collective consumer power and of the Beef Trust, the midwestern cartel that conspired to keep meat prices high despite efforts by the U.S. government to curtail its nefarious practices. With few resources and little experience but steely determination, this group of women organized themselves into a potent fighting force and, in their first foray into the political arena in their adopted country, successfully challenged powerful, vested corporate interests and set a pattern for future generations to follow. [Amazon]

Singer, David, “The Jewish Gangster: Crime as ‘Unzer Shtik,’” Judaism 23, no. 1 (1974)

Siporin, Steve, “The Kosher Con Game: Who’s Keeping Kosher in Prison?” Western Folklore 74, no. 1 (2015)

4.2.12 Dan Slater, The Incorruptibles

Slater, Dan, (The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld [hc, Little, Brown 2024] 978-0316427715 [Explores the intersection of Jewish immigration, organized crime, and private reform efforts in early 20th-century New York City. The story is primarily set in the Lower East Side of the 1910s, then the most densely populated ghetto on Earth. Eastern European Jewish immigrants, facing limited economic mobility and living in squalid tenements, formed a complex web of crime syndicates involved in horse poisoning, gambling, prostitution, and labor racketeering. The narrative is bookended by two notorious crimes: the 1912 murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal and the 1928 murder of Arnold Rothstein. Rosenthal’s murder, which involved a conspiracy between gangsters and corrupt police (specifically Lieutenant Charles Becker), drew international attention and fueled nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment. 

The Benefactors: Afluent German-Jewish “uptowners,” including Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg, were horrified by the criminal element in the Jewish community. They feared that Jewish crime would validate antisemitic rhetoric and lead to immigration restrictions.

The Mission: They privately funded a secret, off-the-books vice squad nicknamed the ”Incorruptibles” to clean up the Lower East Side.

Key Figures: The squad was led by ambitious young reformers like Harry Newburger and utilized revolutionary investigative techniques from detective Joseph Faurot, such as early wiretapping (“bridging wires”). Slater weaves together the lives of various historical figures, illustrating the “uptown vs. downtown” clash: 

Gangsters: Arnold Rothstein (the “Big Bankroll”), Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, “Dopey Benny” Fein, and “Bald Jack” Rose.

Reformers and Public Figures: Louis Marshall, Judah Magnes, and Abraham Cahan. 

Unintended Consequences: The book argues that the Incorruptibles’ efforts to dismantle local vice unwittingly cleared the way for a more sophisticated, professionalized “mobster class” that would dominate the Prohibition era.

Social Evolution: The Jewish crime wave was ultimately a one-generation phenomenon; as the community gained social and economic footing, involvement in crime plummeted by 1950.

Political Climate: The narrative highlights the looming threat of the anti-immigration lobby and the burgeoning antisemitism that mirrored later developments in Europe. – Google/AI]

Stuart, Mark, (Gangster No. 2: Longy Zwillman, the Man Who Invented Organized Crime [hc, Lyle Stuart, 1985]) 978-0818403972

Sugerman, Myron, (The Chronicles of The Last Jewish Gangster: From Meyer to Myron [pb. Independently published, 2019] 978-1973212591 [See related film] [Note: See “Last Man Standing: The Chronicles of Myron Sugerman (2023)” in the companion Filmography.]

Templer, Donald I. & Penny A. Jackson, “Jewish inmates: an Atypical Prison Group,” Psychological Reports 71, no. 2 (1992)

Tepperman, Alex, “Vicious Bastards and Complete Bores: Trends in Jewish American Crime History since World War Two,” Journal of Jewish Identities, 18:2, July 2025 (Johns Hopkins UP).

4.2.13 Alex Tepperman, “Vicious Bastards and Complete Bores”

Alex Tepperman is a Canadian historian and criminologist whose work focuses on historical criminology, prisons, crime history, and, more recently, Jewish crime in North America. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg. I thought his essay on the field sufficiently comprehensive and insightful to provide the following synopsis of it:

Alex Tepperman’s article is primarily a historiographical essay. Rather than studying Jewish criminals themselves, it examines how scholars have written about Jewish crime in America from the 1940s to the present and how interpretations of Jewish criminality have changed over time.

Central Argument: Tepperman argues that the study of Jewish-American crime has passed through several distinct phases:

1. Pre–World War II: largely the domain of sociologists and criminologists.
2. Postwar through the late twentieth century: dominated by historians who focused heavily on gangsters and organized crime.
3. Twenty-first century: increasingly shaped by social historians studying ordinary offenders, community responses to crime, prisons, policing, vice, gender, and everyday experiences rather than only famous mobsters.

His title reflects a tension in the field: historians have often preferred colorful, violent, larger-than-life gangsters (“vicious bastards”) while neglecting the far more representative but less dramatic criminals who made up most Jewish offenders (“complete bores”).

1. Early Scholarship: Crime as a Sociological Problem

Tepperman notes that before World War II, Jewish crime was usually treated as a question of: immigrant adjustment, delinquency, poverty, social mobility, assimilation. Researchers asked whether Jews were more or less criminal than other groups and tried to explain statistical patterns of criminal behavior. Crime was viewed as a social problem rather than a cultural symbol.

This scholarship often focused on: juvenile delinquency, prison populations, urban social conditions, criminological measurement. By the 1960s, however, sociologists largely abandoned the subject, leaving historians to dominate the field.

2. The Rise of Historical Studies in the 1970s–1990s

The field expanded rapidly during the 1970s. Yet Tepperman argues that historians largely ignored the “new social history” methods then transforming other areas of scholarship. Instead of studying ordinary criminals from below, they concentrated on: famous gangsters, organized crime syndicates, racketeering and underworld celebrities. This produced a literature centered on figures such as: Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Schultz and other nationally known Jewish mobsters. The result was a highly selective picture of Jewish criminality. Rather than asking how crime functioned within Jewish communities, historians often focused on spectacular personalities and criminal empires.

3. The Gangster as an Ethnic Hero

One of Tepperman’s most important observations is that late twentieth-century historians frequently transformed Jewish gangsters into symbols of ethnic pride. Several recurring themes emerged:

Tough Jews: Gangsters became evidence that Jews were not merely passive victims. Historians and popular writers portrayed mobsters as: physically powerful, masculine, aggressive and capable of defending Jewish communities against antisemitism. This interpretation challenged stereotypes of Jewish weakness.

Community Protectors: Gangsters were often depicted as: defenders of Jewish neighborhoods, enemies of Nazis and antisemites, protectors of immigrants. According to Tepperman, this tendency sometimes romanticized criminal activity by emphasizing communal service over exploitation or violence.

Symbols of Assimilation: Scholars also used gangsters as indicators of Jewish integration into American society. The logic was that participation in organized crime demonstrated Jews had become fully involved in every aspect of American life—even its criminal underworld.

4. The Myth of the Jewish Underworld

Tepperman is especially critical of what he calls the tendency to imagine a separate Jewish “underworld.” In much historical writing: gangsters appear detached from normal Jewish life, crime is treated as a self-contained world, criminals are depicted as exceptional figures existing outside the community.

This approach borrowed heavily from literary and popular culture notions of an organized-crime “underworld.” Tepperman argues that such portrayals obscure the fact that criminals remained embedded within: families, neighborhoods, synagogues, businesses and ethnic networks. The separation between “respectable Jews” and “criminal Jews” was often far less complete than earlier historians suggested.

5. Critique of Romanticized Narratives

A major theme of the article is criticism of what Tepperman sees as overly sentimental scholarship. He identifies several problems:

Selective Memory: Historians often celebrated gangsters while minimizing: extortion, violence, exploitation, prostitution and labor racketeering.

Masculinity Narratives: Many works treated gangsters as vehicles for reconstructing Jewish masculinity. The gangster became a cultural hero rather than a subject of critical analysis.

Exceptionalism: Research focused on a tiny number of highly visible criminals while neglecting the broader realities of crime and deviance among ordinary Jews.

6. New Directions in Twenty-First-Century Scholarship

Tepperman sees the most significant advances occurring in recent decades. New historians have shifted attention toward:

Everyday Criminality - Instead of studying only famous mobsters, scholars investigate: petty offenders, juvenile delinquents, prisoners, smugglers, sex workers, traffickers, small-scale criminals.

Gender - Recent studies examine: women offenders, prostitution, trafficking, family strategies and female participation in criminal economies.

Migration - Crime is increasingly linked to: migration networks, transnational mobility, immigration restrictions and global economic systems.

Community Institutions - Researchers now study how Jewish organizations responded to crime through: social work, reform campaigns, welfare institutions, policing initiatives and anti-trafficking efforts.

7. Beyond Organized Crime

Tepperman highlights a broadening of the field beyond classic mob history. Recent work examines: drug markets, prisons, policing, white-collar crime, juvenile justice, social control, vice regulation and state surveillance. This produces a more complete picture of Jewish interactions with legal and illegal systems.

8. Future Research Agenda

The article concludes by identifying important areas still understudied. Tepperman calls for more work on: ordinary offenders rather than celebrity gangsters; women and gender; prisons and incarceration; white-collar and financial crime; comparative ethnic crime studies; interactions between Jews and criminal justice institutions and collaboration between historians and criminologists. He argues that historians and social scientists should reconnect after decades of separation, combining archival research with criminological methods.

Significance for the Study of Jews and Crime

For anyone researching Jewish crime history, Tepperman’s article is important because it provides a map of the entire field. His main contribution is showing that scholarship moved:

from sociological studies of delinquency → to romanticized histories of gangsters → to a newer social history of crime embedded in everyday Jewish life.

The article is also a critique of the long-standing fascination with Jewish mobsters. Tepperman contends that historians have often preferred dramatic stories of gangland figures because they are more exciting and culturally meaningful, while neglecting the much larger history of ordinary Jewish encounters with crime, punishment, and social control.

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