Jews at Work

This book addresses the educational, occupational, and income progress of Jews in the American labor market. Using theoretical and statistical findings, it compares the experience of American Jews with that of other Americans, from the middle of the 19th century through the 20th and into the early 21st century.Jews in the United States have been remarkably successful; from peddlers and low-skilled factory workers, clearly near the bottom of the economic ladder, they have, as a community, risen to the top of the economic ladder. The papers included in this volume, all authored or co-authored by Barry Chiswick, address such issues as the English language proficiency, occupational attainment and earnings of Jews, educational and labor market discrimination against Jews, life cycle and labor force participation patterns of Jewish women, and historical and methodological issues, among many others. The final chapter analyzes alternative explanations for the consistently high level of educational and economic achievement of American Jewry over the past century and a half. The chapters in this book also develop and demonstrate the usefulness of alternative techniques for identifying Jews in US Census and survey data where neither religion nor Jewish ethnicity is explicitly identified. This methodology is also applicable to the study of other minority groups in the US and in other countries.

“Chiswick’s work is broad in scope.” (Paul Burstein, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 33, 2023)

Barry R. Chiswick is Professor of Economics and of International Affairs at the George Washington University and a Research Fellow at IZA Institute of Labor Economics and at GLO Global Labor Organization. He is a former Senior Staff Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has received numerous honors for his research, including Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa from Lund University (Sweden) a Fulbright Foundation Research Fellowship, the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the Carleton C. Qualey Article Award from the Immigration History Society, and the Marshall Sklare Award from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry. His research has been published in journals in Economics, Sociology, History, Demography, Jewish Studies, and Socio-linguistics.