Abstract
Throughout the era of Jewish mass migration to the United States, organized crime played a central role in stabilizing the business practices and union affairs in the kosher food industries of the New York metropolitan area. Two key sectors of New York’s kosher foods trades, kosher poultry and Jewish baked goods, demonstrate the various ways in which underworld leaders came to informally police chaotic business sectors upended by laissez-faire capitalism and the large-scale relocation of European Jews to urban America. In kosher poultry, a cartel of butchers, teamsters, and various other workers mobilized organized crime and violence to remove the threat posed by Barnett Baff, an ambitious Jewish immigrant entrepreneur who aimed to vertically integrate the industry. In Jewish baked goods, the labor chieftain Max Kazimirsky managed a brutal and corrupt regime in the Hebrew bakers ’unions. But despite his widely documented use of violence and coercion, Kazimirsky succeeded in maintaining a closed shop system among New York’s bakeries and union control over production and distribution. The domineering role of organized crime in kosher foods during this period conveys the ways immigrants to Gilded Age and Progressive Era America forged their own methods of imposing order over ethnic capitalist marketplaces, ones not approved by city authorities but which, nevertheless, provided a modicum of industrial stability.
