Destructive Creators: Jewish Immigrant Bankers, the Business of Mass Migration and the Failures that Reshaped American Finance, 1914

Rebecca Kobrin, Columbia University, explores how Jewish immigrant banks were central to the daily economic lives of thousands of Yiddish speaking Jews on the Lower East Side and in Brownsville. These 'banks' not only helped East European Jews book passage to the United States, but they helped them engage and negotiate American capitalism, by providing them with loans, savings accounts, and means to transfer money abroad.