The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880-1915

by Thomas Kessner

A comparative study of the upward mobility and the changing residential patterns of Italian and Jewish immigrants and the paths each took toward Americanization during their first twenty-five years in New York City

Genres: History, Nonfiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 1977

About the author

Thomas Kessner is Distinguished Professor at City University of New York.

Reviews

[Isabel Rowland]

I read this because I needed a book for my research paper, and while it contained many useful statistics, I almost fell asleep while reading it around 5 times (which is not good when you're supposed to be babysitting)

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

From 1880 until World War I, millions of “New Immigrants” embarked upon America’s shores in search of the fulfillment of the promise engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty, that they, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” would find freedom and opportunity, and ultimately, “golden” economic success, within American borders. Conventional wisdom would have it that the immigrants did find monetary success in their new land, but that these victories were not evenly distributed among the immigrant communities. Of the most prominent groups of New Immigrants to settle in New York City, convention says that Jews outpaced Italians in climbing the ladder of social and economic advancement, perhaps due to innate ethnic differences.
Thomas Kessner’s groundbreaking 1977 work, The Golden Door, employs purely statistical methods in testing that conventional wisdom and its underlying causes. Milking an astonishing amount of insight from purely numerical census return data, Kessner attempts to quantify the social and economic mobility that both groups exhibited (and, to be sure, Jews did find higher economic attainment than their Italian counterparts on a whole). With an eye for the methodological pitfalls inherent in every form of statistical historical analysis, Kessner opts to provide nearly every possible manipulation of the numerical data in the hopes of compellingly demonstrating the two groups’ different trajectories of socio-economic mobility. Although almost every form of analysis that he presents is incomplete in some way on its own, the author succeeds in demonstrating his point when the book is examined in its collective.
As quantitative histories go, The Golden Door is a masterful study that provides a wealth of meaningful data quantifying economic mobility of Italian and Jewish immigrants. However, as with all quantitative history, its numbers cannot tell any more than they do, and they cannot tell the whole story.

[Sean Chick · Rating 4 out of 5]

While certainly not the last word on the subject, this is a brief and readable book that will not overwhelm you with jargon or facts. If you are new to the subject of immigration, this is an excellent starting point.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it was good? I forget.