“Vicious Bastards and Complete Bores”: Trends in Jewish-American crime history since World War Two

While Jewish-American crime was primarily a matter of sociological study prior to World War Two, post-war sociologists allowed historians to take near-total ownership of the subject by the 1960s. Despite the subfield’s rapid development throughout the 1970s, the first generation of historians to study this topic in depth did not build on the “bottom-up” approaches to crime and deviance popular within the New Social History, instead favouring narratives that focused on celebrity gangsters and major urban crime syndicates. Throughout the late-twentieth century, research into Jewish-American crime generally focused on powerful individuals, positioning gangsters as symbols of Jewish masculinity and as protectors of their communities. Scholars also leaned into literary notions of a Jewish crime existing within an archetypal “underworld,” wherein career criminals operated apart from normal Jewish life. These sentimental and stylized approaches to the study of Jewish-American crime monopolized the field until the twenty-first century, when a new generation of historians began to develop a competing literature that was more grounded in the realities of everyday life. This paper tracks the development of Jewish-American crime scholarship into the present and discusses important recent innovations within the field. It concludes by highlighting potential areas for future research and advocating for greater collaboration between historians and social scientists.