WHERE ARE AMERICA'S JEWS TODAY?

Outstanding piece of Jewish history and factually true. My father [now dead] grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan [Avenue B and 5th Street] with many tough Jews who were gangsters. Bugsy Siegal was very well known as one of those very tough Jews. May those Jews who supported the cause for both Jewish-Americans and Israel rest in peace. God bless them. They were true American and Jewish heroes. Fighting for freedom is American as apple pie. Rich
>
> There are few excuses for the behavior of Jewish
> gangsters in the 1920s and
> 1930s The best known Jewish gangsters - Meyer
> Lansky, Bugsy Siegel,
> LongyZwillman, Moe Dalitz - were involved in the
> numbers rackets, illegal
> drug dealing, prostitution, gambling and loan
> sharking. They were not nice
> men.
>
> During the rise of American Nazism in the 1930s
> and when Israel was being
> founded between 1945 and 1948, however, they
> proved staunch defenders of the
> Jewish people.
>
> The roots of Jewish gangsterism lay in the
> ethnic neighborhoods of the Lower
> East Side; Brownsville,// //Brooklyn//; Maxwell
> Street in Chicago; and Boyle
> Heights in Los Angeles. Like other newly arrived
> groups in American history,
> a few Jews who considered themselves blocked
> from respectable professions
> used crime as a means to "make good"
> economically. The market for vice
> flourished during Prohibition and Jews joined
> with others to exploit the
> artificial market created by the legal bans on
> alcohol, gambling, paid sex
> and narcotics.
>
> Few of these men were religiously observant.
> They rarely attended services,
> although they did support congregations
> financially. They did not keep
> kosher or send their children to day schools.
> However, at crucial moments
> they protected other Jews, in America and around
> the world.
>
> The 1930s were a period of rampant anti-Semitism
> in America, particularly in
> the Midwest. Father Charles Coughlin, the Radio
> Priest in Detroit,
> and William Pelley of Minneapolis, among others,
> openly called for Jews to
> be driven from positions of responsibility, if
> not from the country itself.
>
> Organized Brown Shirts in New York and Silver
> Shirts in Minneapolis outraged
> and terrorized American Jewry. While the older
> and more respectable Jewish
> organizations pondered a response that would not
> alienate non-Jewish
> supporters, others - including a few rabbis
> -asked the gangsters to break up
> American Nazi rallies.
>
> Historian Robert Rockaway writing in the journal
> of the American Jewish
> Historical Society, notes that German-American
> Bund rallies in the New York
> City area posed a dilemma for mainstream Jewish
> leaders. They wanted the
> rallies stopped, but had no legal grounds on
> which to do so. New York State
> Judge Nathan Perlman personally contacted Meyer
> Lansky to ask him to disrupt
> the Bund rallies, with the proviso that Lansky's
> henchmen stop short of
> killing any Bundists. Enthusiastic for the
> assignment, if disappointed by
> the restraints, Lansky accepted all of Perlman's
> terms except one: he would
> take no money for the work. Lansky later
> observed, "I was a Jew and felt
> for those Jews in Europe who were suffering.
> They were my brothers."
>
> For months, Lansky's workmen effectively broke
> up one Nazi rally after
> another. As Rockaway notes, "Nazi arms, legs and
> ribs were broken and skulls
> were cracked, but no one died."
>
> Lansky recalled breaking up a Brown Shirt rally
> in the Yorkville section of
> Manhattan: "The stage was decorated with a
> swastika and a picture of Hitler.
> The speakers started ranting. There were only
> fifteen of us, but we went
> into action. We threw some of them out the
> windows. . . . Most of the Nazis
> panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat
> them up... We wanted to show
> them that Jews would not always sit back and
> accept insults."
>
> In Minneapolis, William Dudley Pelley organized
> a Silver Shirt Legion to
> "rescue" America from an imaginary
> Jewish-Communist conspiracy. In Pelle's
> own words, just as "Mussolini and his Black
> Shirts saved Italy and as Hitler
> and his Brown Shirts saved Germany," he would
> save America from Jewish
> communists. Minneapolis gambling czar David
> Berman confronted Pelley's
> Silver Shirts on behalf of the Minneapolis
> Jewish community.
>
> Berman learned that Silver Shirts were mounting
> a rally at Lodge. When the
> Nazi leader called for all the "Jew bastards" in
> the city to be expelled, or
> worse, Berman and his associates burst in to the
> room and started cracking
> heads. After ten minutes, they had emptied the
> hall. His suit covered in
> blood, Berman took the microphone and announced,
> "This is a warning. Anybody
> who says anything against Jews gets the same
> treatment. Only next time it
> will be worse." After Berman broke up two more
> rallies, there were no more
> public Silver Shirt meetings in Minneapolis.
>
> Jewish gangsters also helped establish Israel
> after the war. One famous
> example is a meeting between Bugsy Siegel and
> Reuven Dafne, a Haganah
> emissary, in 1945. Dafne was seeking funds and
> guns to help liberate
> Palestine from British rule. A mutual friend
> arranged for the two men to
> meet.
>
> "You mean to tell me Jews are fighting?" Siegel
> asked "You mean fighting as
> in killing?" Dafne answered in the affirmative.
>
> Siegel replied, "I'm with you."
>
> For weeks, Dafne received suitcases filled with
> $5 and $10 bills -- $50,000
> in all -- from Siegel.
>
> No one should paint gangsters as heroes. They
> committed acts of great evil.
> But historian Rockaway has presented a textured
> version of Jewish gangster
> history in a book ironically titled, "But They
> Were Good to their Mothers."
>
> Some have observed that, despite their
> disreputable behavior, they could be
> good to their people, too. A little interesting
> Jewish history.