Jewish-American organized crime
Culture | Active
1888 CE to 2057 CE
Jewish-American organized crime (sometimes called the Jewish Mob, Jewish Mafia, Kosher Mafia, or the Kosher Nostra —a play on words of Cosa Nostra), emerges during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the late 19th century in New York City, Monk Eastman operates a powerful Jewish gang that competes with Italian and Irish gangs, notably Paul Kelly's Five Points Gang, for control of New York City's underworld.In the early 1920s, stimulated by the economic opportunities of the Roaring Twenties and later, Prohibition, organized crime figures such as Arnold Rothstein are controlling a wide range of criminal enterprises.
According to crime writer Leo Katcher, Rothstein "transformed organized crime from a thuggish activity by hoodlums into a big business, run like a corporation, with himself at the top."
Rothstein is allegedly responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series.
The largely Jewish-American gang known as Murder Inc., as well as mobsters such as Meyer Lansky, gain significant influence within the Italian American Mafia.
For decades after, Jewish-American mobsters continue to work closely and at times compete with Italian-American organized crime.
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Los Angeles gangster Mickey (the ”Boss”) Cohen has donated fifty thousand dollars toward the seventy-five thousand dollar purchase price of an American ship, renamed the Altalena.
All together, Cohen and other gangsters contribute one hundred and twenty thousand to the Irgun or to the Bergson Group, the Irgun's American lobbying organization, between 1939 and 1949.
During the Arab-Israel cease-fire of June 1948, Ben-Gurion's proclamation of a unified military structure is challenged by Begin's Irgun, which sails the Altalena, a ship carrying arms, into Tel Aviv harbor in June.
Ben-Gurion orders Haganah troops commanded by Rabin to fire on the ship, which is set aflame on the beach in Tel Aviv.
Eight-two people are killed in the action; Begin is one of the survivors.
Among the dead is Abraham Stavsky, a Revisionist who had been a suspect in the unsolved 1933 murder of Labor leader Chaim Arlosoroff.
With the two camps on the verge of civil war, Begin orders his troops not to fire on the Haganah.
The Irgun and Palmach—the regular fighting force of the Haganah— finally consent to the unified command, but relations between the Labor movement Ben-Gurion had established and its right-wing opposition, founded in Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party, will be poisoned for years.
The Altalena affair unifies the IDF but will remain a bitter memory for Begin and the Irgun.