'On the side of liquor': American Jews and the politics of alcohol, 1870--193

This dissertation examines the Jewish experience in the American alcohol trade between 1870 and 1936, and considers the specific social, economic, and political issues brought to bear by Jewish involvement in an increasingly controversial sector of the American economy. I also consider shifts in American Jewish attitudes toward alcohol, as well as gentile attitudes toward Jews, as anti-alcohol movements gained strength and power.;Drawing on a wide range of archival, published, and genealogical sources, I have mapped Jewish participation in local alcohol production and purveyance in Newark, New Jersey; Cincinnati, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; and Atlanta, Georgia. Jewish immigrants from both Central and Eastern Europe found an occupational niche in the alcohol trade in all of these cities. Central European Jews who took up the trade in the nineteenth century achieved upward economic mobility within it. For these Jewish immigrants, participation in the alcohol industry and in anti-prohibition politics created opportunities for economic and political alliances with other Americans. As a result, alcohol became a force for Jewish acculturation in the United States during the nineteenth century.;Eastern European Jews who sold alcohol in the early twentieth century, on the other hand, often remained economically and socially marginal. This wave of Jewish immigration coincided with an increased traction and popularity of American nativist ideologies; populist anti-Semitism and prohibition sentiment soon found common cause. In the years leading up to World War I, participation in the alcohol trade became a barrier to acculturation. My dissertation locates early twentieth century criticism of the Jewish relationship to alcohol within a larger constellation of anxieties about the increasingly commercial, cosmopolitan, and pluralistic nature of American society.;As one might gather from Henry Ford's 1921 accusation that "the Jews are on the side of liquor and always have been," American Jews found themselves on the defensive during the Prohibition era. By looking at Jewish responses to Prohibition, and by noting the changes in Jewish reactions to temperance and prohibition movements from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, my work broadens our understanding of the American Jewish experience during these formative decades of immigration and acculturation.