Jews and Judaism in the United States: A Documentary History

No subject has so preoccupied students of the American Jewish experience in the twentieth century as the need to explain Jewish achievement. Few, if any, deny that Jews have attained disproportionately high levels of education, income, and professional status. In fact, no other immigrant group in American history has risen from abject poverty into the middle class-as a group-so rapidly or so completely as the East European Jews of the 1881-1914 mass migration. An analysis made during the mid-1970's by the National Opinion Research Center for the Ford Foundation, based on a "composite sample" of 18,000 Americans, found the Jews to be the wealthiest and best-educated "religio-ethnic" group in American society. Even southern Jews (despite the exclusion of Florida from the study) were very well educated, were concentrated in professional, managerial, and executive occupations, and were economically well-off. Are Jews motivated by an intensely strong spirit of achievement, and if so, does that spirit account for their extraordinary position in American society? Or did Jews come to America with occupational skills better suited to urban living than those of other immigrant groups, even though all had approximately the same economic status upon arrival? Perhaps the traditional veneration of learning in Jewish culture has no parallel in the beliefs of other immigrants, and the Jews have managed to transform this into a greater respect and desire for higher education-and thus a greater degree of occupational mobility-than have others? Is it that Jewish immigrants already had an effective community organization, which ethnic groups not previously faced with the problem of adapting as a minority did not develop? All these explanations are consistent with one another, but are hard to disentangle and evaluate. How can the outstanding achievements of Jews in America be explained?