The Yiddish historians and the struggle for a Jewish history of the Holocaust

Abstract

successfully than Al Capone and his Jewish equivalents ever could. Sadly, the interpretation that Kraus reflects was first articulated by Loesch in a speech to students at Princeton University in 1930. He proclaimed: “It’s the foreigners and the first generation of Americans who are loaded on us... The real Americans are not gangsters... the Jews [are] furnishing the brains and the Italians the brawn”. A version of this crudely xenophobic interpretation of organized crime came to dominate popular and professional perceptions of the problem and lay behind RICO and other organized crime control measures that have not come close to eradicating organized crime in the United States.