“Jews are well-known for being entrepreneurs, traders and business-people who beat the odds. Out of the best 25 money managers since the advent of American Capitalism, 17 are Jewish!”
Factors:
1) The Location and timing of Jewish immigration into the U.S.
2) Unavailability of alternative career options for Jews.
3) Claims of Higher Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
4) Jewish culture has evolved to encourage a very strong focus on academic literacy and scholarship. (religion)
5) A culture of prudence and financial saving.
6) Sense of togetherness and love for one another.
How Jews Became White Folks | Karen Brodkin.
Quotes from Brodkin:
“The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Americans saw Jews as inferior and not considered white, Nordic and Anglo Saxon mixed with inferior European races would destroy the fabric of the nation.”
“My parents expect antisemitism to be a part of daily life, as I expect racism to be a part of it. They came of age in the Jewish world in the 1920s and 1930s, at the peak of antisemitism in America. They are rightly proud of their upward mobility and think of themselves as pulling themselves up by their own bootstrap.”
antisemitism — hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people.
“Part of my ethnic heritage was the belief that Jews were smart and that our success was due to our own efforts and abilities, reinforced by a culture that valued sticking together, hard work, education, and deferred gratification.”
[Deferred gratification? Sounds familiar. — The partially flawed marshmallow experiment].
Brodkin’s main argument: “I am willing to affirm all those abilities and ideals and their contribution to Jew’s upward mobility, but I also argue that they were still far from sufficient to account for Jewish success. I say this because the belief in a Jewish version of Horatio Alger has become a point of entry for some mainstream Jewish organizations to adopt a racist attitude against African Americans especially and to oppose affirmative action to people of color. Instead, I want to suggest that Jewish success is a product not only of ability but also the removal of powerful social barriers to its realization.”
“1980s resurgence of corporate criminals bringing back Jewish stereotypes Jews as Shylocks.”
[William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Shylock is a Venetian Jewish moneylender, banker, credit loaner].
Conclusion:
Jews or the Jewish community have mastered pooling resources together. They managed to thrive despite living in hostile environments by building their own businesses and investing in themselves since they often had no other choice due to discrimination. This was also prevalent when they immigrated to the United States with laws limiting them to what they could do. To survive as a family and as a community, the Jews were forced to adapt and teach themselves. They led the garment industry and made cinema a staple in American culture by being one of the first pioneers in the film industry by creating Hollywood back when it was not as popular. Post-Nazi Germany or WW2, and once the systemic barriers were lifted for Southern and Eastern European immigrants like Jews, they were able to excel in their education in part because of government assistance. One more thing I shall add is Jews are receiving reparations from Germany for the inhumane acts of the Nazis. Although I am not familiar with the compensation and how much that played a factor in their standard of living.
In short, the government intervened by implementing social engineering programs to create an opportunity to lift those in poverty to affluence. Government intervention isn’t always a successful experiment, recall when blacks were blocked or red-lined in the housing market because of the FHA program that inadvertently caused a dual housing market (white flight to the suburbs), one black and one white. Of course, many of the white races, or those who passed as white when America no longer had a hierarchy of different white races, Jews jumped to the opportunity of bettering themselves and their situation. Thus, several poor Jewish families were able to enter a growing middle-class population alongside other American immigrants. What made Jews in particular a special case was an increase of opportunity in education and in the way they networked and pooled resources together within their own community, as well as networking around the world with other of their fellow Jews. In many cases, this was out of necessity for being denied access or shunned by others, which in turn gated them into their own communities so they had to rely mostly on themselves for survival. The Jew’s offspring or children were able to prosper in this crazy roller coaster social experiment of trial and error that mostly came from the hatred from other groups and also from the lack of comradery between different cultures.
Social Scholarly 