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" The Jewish Strong Arm Men: "
Welt, Aaron Raymond
Diner, Hasia R
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1106449
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2394319772
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| Main Entry
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Diner, Hasia R
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Welt, Aaron Raymond
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| Title & Author
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The Jewish Strong Arm Men:\ Welt, Aaron RaymondDiner, Hasia R
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| College
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New York University
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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220
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| Abstract
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During the era of mass Jewish migration to the United States over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, organized crime emerged as an important player in the development of Jewish immigrant capitalism in New York City. Jewish employers, especially in the garment industry, as well as labor leaders who organized unions of Yiddish-speaking workers, hired gangsters known as “Jewish strong arm men” to perform violence during strikes and for a variety of industrial functions. Unions of Jewish immigrant workers, in particular the United Hebrew Trades (UHT) and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), collaborated with Jewish organized crime figures based in immigrant neighborhoods in order to protect striking workers from violence, to disrupt operations in non-union factories, and to instill a sense of industrial order as labor attempted to create a closed shop system across the Jewish ethnic economy. This alliance between Jewish organized crime and organized labor set the agenda for American Jewish progressive activists. American Jewish political and industrial reformers sought to impose their own sense of order in Jewish immigrant capitalism, while also refuting the claims of immigration restriction advocates that Jews and other newcomers to America exacerbated the problems of urban vice and crime. Therefore, over the 1910s, American Jewish progressive institutions, such as the Kehillah-Jewish Community of New York, devised a number of policies devoted to removing strong arm men from the Jewish ethnic economy as well as providing a means to mediate disputes between Jewish workers and employers. American Jewish progressives achieved a degree of success in their endeavors until Jewish strong arm men re-emerged during the so-called “civil war” in the ILGWU over the mid-1920s, as moderate socialists and left wing communists battled for control of the union. Throughout the years of mass Jewish migration to the United States, Jewish organized crime took on an outsized role in the development of the Jewish ethnic economy and the political debates that engrossed American Jewry.
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| Subject
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American history
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Ethnic studies
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Judaic studies
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