Jewish Gangsters Jewish gangsters rode organized crime out of the ghetto to a life of violence and crime. The following article is reprinted with permission from Jewishgates.org. Louis Lepke Buchalter Louis Lepke Buchalter (1897-1944) was nicknamed "Lepkele" (little Louis) by his mother. We Also Recommend J. By the time Lepke was 18, his family, except Louis, had moved out West. It was in this brawling neighborhood, that Buchalter embarked on his criminal career. Upon his release he turned his talent to labor racketeering. Lepke's system worked and he became a legend. In his private life Lepke was a devoted family man who rarely drank or gambled, and he never raised his voice. By 1932 Buchalter dominated a wide assortment of industries in New York, including the bakery and pastry drivers, the milliners, the garment workers, the shoe trade, the poultry market, the taxicab business, the motion picture operators, and the fur truckers. Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today.
Lepke Buchalter Jewish gangster Lepke was hunted down by Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Chapters in American Jewish History are provided by the American Jewish Historical Society, collecting, preserving, fostering scholarship and providing access to the continuity of Jewish life in America for more than 350 years (and counting). We Also Recommend Visit www.ajhs.org. Most of our "Chapters in American Jewish History" have related stories about positive Jewish contributions to American life. Louis Buchalter was born in 1897 and grew up on the Lower East Side of New York, one of 13 children. By contrast, Thomas E. Italian and Jewish gangs dominated the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn in which Lepke lived. Had syndicated extortion remained focused only on small retail businesses and petty criminals, it would not have become the subject of national notoriety. Dewey, the descendant of anti-slavery Republicans, found these industrial arrangements no better than slavery itself. Did you like this article?
The Lower Lower East Side What most American Jews know about New York's Lower East Side comes from books like Irving Howe's World of our Fathers, perhaps memories of family shopping excursions to Orchard Street or tours of the Tenement Museum. But I was born and raised in the neighborhood at a time when there were still pushcarts along Avenue C, street corner vendors selling knishes or ice cream (depending on the season) and shuls on practically every block. Fading into HistoryAllen Salkin, Wired New York. The Jewish Lower East Side is turning into a museum piece. The Best Proletarian Novel Ever WrittenD.G. By the 1950s, just as the Lower East Side's Jewish heyday was behind it, a wave of post-World War II Holocaust refugees breathed new life into the area. In An Immigrant Neighborhood Shirley J. Yee devotes a chapter to the Oldest Profession which was thriving in the neighborhood viewing anti-vice organizations as trying to impose "middle-class values on poor and immigrant people."
(F)rum Runners Prohibition is perennially making a comeback, at least in the media; and this is one of those revival times. It began with the HBO TV series Boardwalk Empire, now in its second season, set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City and priding itself on its historical accuracy. The show is filled with gangsters, including prominent Jewish gangsters. This fall Ken Burns' three-part PBS documentary Prohibition went beyond the subject's curiosity and entertainment value to treat Prohibition as part of America's struggles over self-definition. The Mafia EncyclopediaCarl Sifakis, Facts on File. WineDaniel Okrent, Jewish Ideas Daily. Jews, of course, were among those immigrants; they were also among the targets of prohibition advocates. The Jewish relationship to alcohol began with the Babylonian exile. Jews arrived in an America whose history of anti-immigrant sentiment was almost as long as that of the republic itself. In 1919 the prohibitionists won. Lawrence J.
Coney Island From the fashionable to the freak-show. Sodom by the sea, the Electric City, the Nickel Empire, the poor people's paradise… Coney Island is a peninsula, formerly an island, in southernmost Brooklyn, New York City with a beach on the Atlantic Ocean. We Also Recommend For hundreds of years, Coney Island has been a place of tremendous popular pleasure as well the site of inglorious land disputes. The famous Cyclone Rollercoaster Jews have played a notable part in the history of Coney Island's development since the late 19th century and up to the present. Summer in the City In the 1870s, Coney Island's newly-developing Manhattan Beach was a destination for wealthy, fashionable vacationers, among them affluent Jews. Even though laws did not exist to prohibit segregation such as this, a public brouhaha erupted. Life of Leisure Samuel W. Lilliputia, or "Midget City" was one of his most popular projects. Did you like this article? Please consider making a donation today. Dr.
Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902 Jewish homemakers mobilized the women of the Lower East Side to protest the inceasing meat prices. Chapters in American Jewish History are provided by the American Jewish Historical Society, collecting, preserving, fostering scholarship and providing access to the continuity of Jewish life in America for more than 350 years (and counting). We Also Recommend Visit www.ajhs.org. In mid-May, 1902, the retail price of kosher meat on the Lower East Side of New York jumped from 12 to 18 cents per pound. On May 15, the press reported that 20,000 women on the Lower East Side broke into kosher butcher shops and rendered meat inedible by taking it into the street, soaking it in gasoline and setting it on fire. According to historian Paula Hyman, the Herald reported that "an excitable and aroused crowd [of mostly women] roamed the streets . . . armed with sticks, vocabularies and well-sharpened nails" in an effort to keep other women from purchasing kosher meat. Did you like this article?
The Crown Heights Riots The outbreak of violence in 1991 was fueled by anti-Semitism. Over several days in late August 1991, the Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood of Crown Heights pulsated with sporadic street violence, as predominantly black protesters targeted members and institutions of the Lubavitch Jewish community. Though the Crown Heights Riots were concentrated in a small subsection of the inner-city neighborhood that had long been known for its well-heeled brownstones and eclectic ethnic makeup, the three days of strife in 1991 spurred changes that far outstretched their immediate effects. The Car Accident Around 8:00 PM on Monday, August 19, 1991, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the international leader and Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch movement was returning to his home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn after a visit to the Old Montefiore Cemetery in adjacent Queens Each time the Rebbe made this trip--his only excursion out of Crown Heights--he was provided a police escort. We Also Recommend