Abstract
The story behind this article is well known: the East-European Jews came to the United States at the same time as many other European immigrant groups (between 1880 and 1920, see Table 6.1); yet the East-European Jewish immigrants and their offspring reached middle class status in fewer decades, or in fewer generations, than did other immigrant groups and their offspring. Explaining this phenomenon of rapid East-European Jewish upward mobility has been a staple product of American social science for at least two generations.’ Indeed, this historical puzzle has received so much attention in discussions of ethnicity and mobility that any refinement of the arguments about Jewish upward mobility cannot help but bear on the way we think about ethnicity and mobility generally. More specifically, the case of the Jews has been prominent in American debates about structure and culture among the immigrants.
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© 2000 Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies
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Perlmann, J. (2000). What the Jews Brought. East-European Jewish Immigration to the United States, c. 1900. In: Vermeulen, H., Perlmann, J. (eds) Immigrants, Schooling and Social Mobility. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985502_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985502_6
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