David Schau
Ethnic Relations
Dr. J.P. Reed
7 June 2014
Success of Jewish-Americans:
Analyzing an Environment vs. Culture Theory
Everybody loves to hear a story of the American Dream that entails hard work, persistence,
determination, and other noteworthy qualities that eventually lead to economic success. An author,
known as Horatio Alger, wrote many novels documenting so-called 'rags to riches' stories from early
American life, and he himself, succeeded economically because of the writings. What many people
over-looked throughout those novels were the misleading stereotypes portrayed throughout the stories.
Analyzing stereotypes, disproving them, or bringing about explanations for them are essential to
understanding the culture of American ways of life. However, stories such as Horatio Alger's portray a
false sense of character towards particular culture’s backgrounds that reaffirm false stereotypes.
Horatio Alger's rhetoric actually suggests that particular groups contain, synthesize, and reach economic
success by their predetermined cultural aspects. Among the most historically successful minority and
cultural groups in the United States of America is the Jewish population, but just like any other minority
group, they do not hold cultural distinctions that give them a head start to success. Actually, it is a huge
myth that race produces positive and negative cultures. Despite that, most Americans (white/Caucasian
Americans) have come to believe that culture distinguishes social class, when, in fact, culture does not,
and cannot define economic success.
To begin with, the melting pot has been boiling on the stove for over 150 years now, and many
global, ethnic, cultural, economic, and political changes have happened over time, resulting in a more
assimilated society today as compared to how society interacted during the large Jewish immigration to
the United States (1880—1920). So before diving head first into what constitutes a stereotype, and the
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problems with them, one must recognize a few simple truths about culture and to adopt them as a
mindset: 1. Some ethnic groups did not start from "the bottom", and already had partial success before
immigrating. 2. There were different opportunities depending on when and where they arrived in the
United States. 3. An analysis of how their cultural values came about is required to prove how success
manifested in American society (Steinberg2001:83). In addition to recognizing Jewish success, it must
be noted that when analyzing other cultures, there are two main myths that have been applied to other
cultures as well. The false theories are that successful groups came to America with the right cultural
values, such as strong family ties and a strong emphasis on education, and another false theory is that
success by one group means that the other groups that did not reach the same amount of success were
deficient in some way. (Steinberg2001:87)
First off, it is a known fact that there is a percentage of Jews in America that are still poor.
These are mostly elderly people that never escaped poverty. In addition, there are a huge proportion of
Jewish people that are still part of the 'working-class' in America. Jews are conspicuously absent from
managerial roles, and are really only represented well in apparel and broadcasting industries. (Steinberg
2001: 90) It is a stereotype that Jews control major media, and that they are also large in the apparel
industry, as the census data shows. How did success in these professions come to be? Looking back to
their history in Europe holds many answers as to why they were able to climb the economic ladder
much quicker than their competitors.
Census data shows that Jews came to America with the same amount of capital that Irish,
Italians, and Polish came to the United States with. “In at least one detail, the historical scenario that
Glazer presents is correct: the majority of Jewish immigrants after 1880 were poor … in sheer economic
terms Jews were generally no better off than other immigrants, most of whom arrived penniless.”
(Steinberg2001: 93) They were far less wealthy than the English and German men arriving. The Jewish
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population also emigrated heavily from Eastern Europe, (Russia). In Europe at the time, there was a law
that Jewish people could not own any land. This fact, although devastating to the Jewish population at
the time, has two major factors for their success: First, it allowed the Jewish people to never be 'rooted'
to their own property, or to have family ties to their land or soil preventing them from being farming
peasants. And secondly, this law forced the Jewish people to live in cities. This meant that most Jews
would work manufacturing jobs where skills like cloth weaving and metal fabrication were the highest
employed industries at the time (Steinberg 2001:94-96, 99).
Already we can see dissimilarity between the Jewish folk and a large percentage of other
immigrants. Since Jewish people worked mostly factory jobs and never owned property, they had a
completely different skill set than the farmers that came from Italy and Ireland. This also worked to
their advantage in many cases because the skill sets they did have were going to be needed for any
industrial revolution to take place. They were similar to the other migrating people of Europe in the fact
that they did not have much money, because competition in their highly populated cities was so drastic,
a large profit was never really produced. One important counter point to the Jewish success in America
is the fact that their people were not allowed to attend school in Eastern Europe. One modern day
stereotype of Jews in America is that they excel much better in academia than the rest of the population,
but the fact is that when they came to the United States, the Jews were uneducated. This position will
be discussed later on, but the point remains that they were poor, exploited, and just as uneducated as
the other immigrants coming into the land of opportunity, yet they still possessed industrial and
commerce skills, contrary to agricultural skills.
With the proper skill set in Eastern Europe, and the great Melting Pot of America being open to
the world, it was a natural fit for Jews to flee exploitation in Europe and make a better life for
themselves in America. What they did not expect was the second industrial revolution taking off and
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the demand for their specific job types to explode. There were many waves of immigrations into the
United States throughout time, from all different backgrounds in Europe. The Jewish population was
different though, they came in the right amount of numbers, to a land who’s job market needed their
labor. Jews became employed upon arriving in the United States because of their various occupational
skills, and accumulated a better net worth than what they had in Eastern Europe. Stephen Steinberg
refers to the immigration as a “great historical timing” (Steinberg2001: 103). Some figures for reference
are pulled from a 1908 United States census, showing that the average weekly wage for foreign-born
males was $11.92 compared to that of Jewish Immigrants (not in the clothing industry) at $14.90. This is
almost a $3.00 difference in weekly pay. (Soc215: 2013)
In conclusion for the immigration to the United States by Jewish-Americans, it is essential to
understand that cultural values did not play a part in the success for the Jewish population. Rather, it
was a great historical timing. The proper skills were possessed, the people had no family real estate in
their homeland, and America’s job market for factory and commerce skills had boomed at the second
industrial revolution, all combining for great success by a large number of people. The Jewish Torah
does not preach a magical key to success, nor was a great plan to rule the world in the Jewish people’s
favor, as some Zionists firmly believes. The sustained success of Jewish-Americans all stems from this
essential “great historical timing”.
Media plays up modern day success of Jews from all directions, portraying Jews as all types of
false identities. Television plays these stereotypes to extreme, ranging from the sitcom Seinfeld, to
crude humor on comedy central’s South Park. Despite whatever stereotypes or negative connotations
American’s believe, there are statistical facts that show that Jewish-Americans still have higher
educational achievements on average than the rest of America. Once again, the major myth is that this
increased formal education is a result from the learning the teachings of Judaism (cultural factor), but
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sociologists would rather like to explain this happening by examining social class, rather than a group’s
culture.
The culture of poverty can be said that “a group in poverty leads to a bad group culture”
(Steinberg2001:88). Basically, it attempts to stress the importance of one’s social class environment
over cultural aspects. Stephen Steinberg describes the hypothesis as, “an alternative to [cultural theory],
is a social class theory that does not deny the operation of cultural factors, but sees them as conditional
on pre-existing class factors.” (Steinberg2001: 131) This theory of the “Culture of Poverty” leads people
to believe that there are certain factors that certain culture’s possess that keep them in poverty. This is
not true, and Stephen Steinberg again addresses this by stating “it is held that cultural factors have little
independent effect on educational outcomes, but are influential only as they interact with class factors”
(Steinberg2001: 132), which demonstrates that cultural factors are manifested and produced by
whatever social class the group is positioned in.
It has been determined that “the experience of the first generation has an impact on the
opportunities of subsequent generations” (Soc215: 2013). So it becomes apparent that the success of
the first generation of Jewish immigrants led to sustained success of their people. It was their slightly
elevated social class status, above first generation Italians and Irish, in America that made them able to
provide a better social class for the next generations to come. The Jewish people had an advantage in
the early years to send their children to school, as few of them were farmers. From this initial
generation having these advantages, it led to sustained success up to the modern day where Jewish
families are still on a higher rung of the economic ladder.
In modern day terms, the Jewish people are still very successful, “2008 Pew Research Center
report on religion estimated from national survey data that 46% of Jewish American families had
incomes above $100,000 a year, substantially more than the median income for all U.S. families”
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($63,366). (Soc215:2013) Despite early discrimination in the early 1900’s, Jewish Americans have
excelled in America, and to this day continue to strive for civil rights among all Americans. They hold
congressional seats, and are distinctively still active in many cultural groups, but let it be known, that
culture does not define success by any means.
To put everything in a simple order to explain the Jewish success in America, it starts from the
Jews initial living conditions. So when and where did the Jewish people come from? The largest of the
migration waves was “Between 1880-1920s 2.5M Eastern European Jews emigrated.” (Soc215:2013). In
Eastern Europe, Jewish people were not allowed to own land or attend school. This put the Jewish
population into urban areas where they were employed in industries of commerce, textiles, and metal
fabrication. The Jewish people were free to migrate and call a new land “home” because they were
unable to own property in their homelands. These factors lead them to the United States of America to
pursue economic freedom and escape religious exploitation and prejudice in Russia. The second
industrial revolution going on in America needed the Jewish workers, as they were skilled in the
industries that were booming at the time. So the success of the first generation of Jewish-Americans
was being employed in decent paying jobs, which allowed the next generations live in a social class that
was much better than living in poverty. In no way are all of these factors culturally related to Jews, but
more related to the social class that the Jewish-Americans found themselves in for the first few
generations of living in the United States. In conclusion, the social class of a group plays a dynamic role
in explaining the origins of success or failure. The Jewish-Americans had their great historical timing
that gave them an advantage that would last for generations to come. For the not so fortunate minority
groups, perhaps it is environment that this country puts them in that can explain their differences today
– because as it is shown by the Jewish-Americans, there are no culture traits that distinguish ethnic
success.
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