IIJS Prof. Rebecca Kobrin, in conversation with Prof. Kim Phillips-Fein, joins to discuss her recent book Credit to the Nation and how entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants transformed commercial banking and enabled the economic and social advancement of Jews in America.
Thursday, September 24, at 1:00 PM | 617 Kent Hall
What are immigrants to do when business opportunities abound in their new home, but banks refuse essential financial support? How could they make the journey in the first place without helping hands? In this lively history, Rebecca Kobrin chronicles the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who stepped up by doing the lending themselves. Arriving from the Russian Empire and settling primarily in New York, they made livelihoods by assisting fellow Jews so they could purchase passage to the United States and, after arriving, obtain credit that other lenders would not dare provide.
Credit to the Nation traces the novel practices of bankers who not only enabled the flourishing of American Jewry but also revolutionized the US financial industry. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials in Russian, Yiddish, German, and English, Kobrin tells a story that is also crucial to the history of New York, as immigrant bankers’ financing of real estate transformed wide swathes of the city. Lenders drove a boom in the prices of tenement buildings, but heavy speculation eventually precipitated the downfall of immigrant banking. Kobrin notes in particular the case of the Bank of United States—a private lender catering primarily to Jewish businessmen—which the Federal Reserve refused to bail out from bankruptcy in 1930. Immigrants’ grasping for credit, and the rise and fall of immigrant banks, gave way to a contemporary banking industry that, ironically, refuses credit to today’s immigrants. Kobrin reminds us that now, as before, the denial of credit pushes entrepreneurial Americans into unregulated money-lending and the trap of endless debt.
Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, in Columbia University’s Department of History, where she teaches in the field of American Jewish History, specializing in modern Jewish migration. She also served as the Co-Director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia.
Her research, teaching, and publications engage in the fields of international migration, urban history, Jewish history, American religion, and diaspora studies. She received her B.A. (1994) from Yale University. She earned a Ph.D. (2002) from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as the Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-6). Her book Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010), was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer prize (2012). She is the editor of Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and is co-editor with Adam Teller of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). In 2015, she was awarded Columbia University’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for her outstanding teaching and her inspirational mentoring of her students.
She is one of the principal investigators leading the award-winning digital humanities Mapping Historical New York project, an award-winning map that visualizes the demographic and spatial changes wrought in New York City between 1850 and 1940.
Kim Phillips-Fein is a historian of 20th-century American politics and political economy, whose interests include the history of political institutions and ideas, the history of labor and capitalism and the history of New York City. She got her B.A. from the University of Chicago (1997) and her Ph.D. from Columbia (2005). She is the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal (Norton, 2009) and Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. Her articles have appeared in many scholarly and popular publications, including the Journal of American History, Labor: The Working-Class History of the Americas, The New York Times, The New Republic and The Nation. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and she is currently serving on the Executive Board of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. She comes to Columbia from New York University, where she taught at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the History Department of the College of Arts and Sciences.
*Guests must register by Tuesday, September 22, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.
While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.