November 23, 2001

The Unlikely Heroes of American Jews in the '20s

By PETER MONAGHAN

In the 1920s, thousands of Eastern European Jews attained success and security in the United States of a kind that had never been available to them before. In Jazz Age Jews (Princeton University Press), Michael Alexander, an assistant professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Oklahoma, asks why, then, so many American Jews esteemed figures like Arnold Rothstein, the godfather of American gambling; and Al Jolson, who donned blackface to align himself with the country's