A ‘QUIRK OF HISTORY’
Historian to discuss the rise of Jewish mobsters in the U.S.
It was the “perfect storm.” There was the advent of Prohibition, then the Great Depression; a nti-Semitism; a high number of first-generation Jewish immigrants; and quotas in colleges and universities designed to limit the number of Jewish students.
Circumstances during the 1920s and ’30s supported the rise of organized crime within the Jewish community — and several other immigrant groups — in most major U.S. cities.
“There wasn’t a lot of other opportunity,” said Albuquerquebased Jewish scholar Naomi Sandweiss. “Most people sought opportunities in very legal and appropriate ways, but for a certain subset of people, all of those factors together created a perfect storm to promote the gang activities.”
Sandweiss, a writer, nonprofit leader and historian, will give a lecture titled A Mobster in the Family: Jewish Outlaws, Gangsters & Bandits at Santa Fe’s Congregation Beit Tikva on Sunday.
This historical era has been of interest to Sandweiss since she wrote a 2013 Tablet Magazine article about Detroit mobster Sam “The Mustache” Norbert, a relative of her then-husband. Norbert was part of the Motor City’s Purple Gang, which was largely Jewish.
Phil Goldstone, vice president of the Congregation Beit Tikva’s board, said its members often try to bring in educational programming. “Sometimes there’s education that is fun,” he said — although he later emphasized it isn’t mob figures themselves that he considers fun.
“These guys were not fun people to know by any means, but the fun part is learning some interesting quirks of history,” he explained.
Members of the Jewish community are likely to have heard of some of the most infamous Jewish mobsters of the era, like Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. The duo has been portrayed in several movies: one of the bad guys in The Godfather Part II is based on Lansky, Siegel as a lead character was portrayed by Warren Beatty in 1991’s “Bugsy,” and both were part of HBO’s recent hit show “Boardwalk Empire.”
But the talk by Sandweiss, expanding on the story of Detroit’s Norbert, and his poor upbringing in Southern Illinois and St. Louis that led to a life of crime, will focus more on the underlying causes that led Jewish people into distributing alcohol, illegal gambling operations, union-busting and, in a particularly famous case, fixing the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds.
Several White Sox players were accused of receiving a payoff from a gambling ring led by Arnold Rothstein to throw the series.
Jewish organized crime mostly didn’t last more than one generation, Sandweiss says. Not only were Jewish mobsters not interested in recruiting family, the social need for it faded away as eras like the Depression and Prohibition did, as well.
“Some of the TV shows and movies semiglamorize some of the activities, and it just became a curiosity for me to understand the reasons why (the Jewish gangsters came to be) and to share them — and to have a discussion, too — about how can people who engaged in some of those horrible activities that resulted in the deaths of others and a lot of other terrible things, can also be contributing in some ways to the building of their communities.”
In what Sandweiss described as one of the ironies of the era, many mobsters donated earnings to positive causes. A history article she cites in her presentation describes Lansky donating to his synagogue and a local university, and New Jersey mob leader Abner “Longie” Zwillman donating truckloads of food and toys to the needy during holidays.
Others were hired to disrupt pro-Nazi rallies near the beginning of World War II and donated money to help Israel gain independence. Sandweiss said it’s believed that some mobsters genuinely cared about these causes, while others did it for the regard.
“Their money, while it was illegal and horrible in many cases in terms of how they received it, they still contributed to many positive causes,” Sandweiss said.