Italians have displaced Jews as the majority group in the men’s garment industry in the metropolitan area, it is revealed in a survey published today by the Conference on Jewish Relations in its quarterly publication Jewish Social Studies.
The survey, embracing 5,720 workers in 48 representative shops, was made by Jacob Loft on the basis of a fellowship established at Columbia University by the Conference in 1937. Of the total, 3,152 workers or 56.1 per cent were found to be Italian, and 2,155 or 38.6 per cent Jewish.
Although 31 of the shops examined were Jewish-owned and 17 Italian-owned, the author of the survey found no evidence to indicate that “the Jewish employer is disinclined to employ Jewish garment workers.” “However,” he added, “he tends to leaven the Jewish mass with a large number of Italian workers. The Italian employer tends to seat Italians in his shop and is strikingly reluctant to employ Jewish workers. It appears that the Italian-owned shop is re-enacting the role of cultural intermediary for the Italian workers that was formerly played by the Jewish-owned she for the Jewish contingent.”
Relegation of the Jewish garment workers to a minority group, Mr. Loft found, “is significant enough to suggest that an added page has been completed in the annals of the industry as an agency for cultural acclimatization. First, immigrant German and Irish displaced native-born workers of Anglo-Saxon and Scottish stock, then Jewish strains from southern, western and eastern Europe supplanted their predecessors, and now we find an Italian group in substantial control of the field, having replaced the Jewish contingent.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
