Language:
German
Year of publication:
2011
Titel der Quelle:
Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung
Angaben zur Quelle:
20 (2011) 195-212
Keywords:
Jews History 20th century
;
Antisemitism History 20th century
;
Gangsters History 20th century
;
Jewish criminals History 20th century
Abstract:
Describes organized Jewish crime in the U.S., coined as the "Kosher Nostra" in 1964, as a historical phenomenon and discusses its role in American antisemitism. Contends that the scope of Jewish participation in organized crime has been exaggerated. Some Jewish criminals - individuals and gangs - were indeed active between 1900-40, mainly in the New York area, but their proportion in the Jewish population was very small and most of them ceased their criminal activities after this period. The gangsters, the most famous of whom were Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Monk Eastman, all came from poor Eastern European Jewish immigrant backgrounds and used crime as a means to extract themselves and their families from misery. Throughout the 1930s, with the blessing of U.S. authorities, Jewish gangsters helped fight antisemites and Nazis in the streets, ports, and factories in New York. The term Kosher Nostra, however, has been used to denote "criminal Jewish conspiracies" beyond this historical framework, as a projection screen for antisemitic prejudice, mainly in the U.S. Emphasizes that contrary to this prejudice, Jewish gangsters and gangs never formed a single, unified front but worked together with Italian and Irish criminals and often fought internally.
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