Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism

Abstract

The economic history of American Jewry represents a major lacuna in American Jewish historiography, but Rebecca Kobrin's edited volume Chosen Capital begins to fill this void. We know far too little,” she argues, “on the spatial and occupational niches that served as safe launching pads for immigrant Jews into the American economy at the turn of the twentieth century, even though these niches were abundantly clear to most contemporary observers. (p. 3) Chosen Capital addresses this historiographical vacuum by offering several individual case studies on specific Jewish economic niches in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asking three central questions: In which economic niches and at what times was the Jewish role central in American capitalism? How can economic history help us understand how Jews achieved rapid social mobility? How did the Jewish economic experience influence the broader American Jewish experience? Chosen Capital combines these questions to ultimately ask “how the experiences of Jews in the United States molded and were molded by the development of America's particular economic system” (p. 8).

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