2. Once Upon A Time In America
Jewish American immigrants started arriving in New Amsterdam as early as 1654, but the crew of Christopher Columbus [] included marranos (Jews who hid their religion to escape the Spanish Inquisition) and conversos (Jews who converted during the Inquisition) (Rollins, 2003, p. 263). However, the highest levels of Jewish immigration occurred from 1880 to 1920, where nearly 2.5 million Jews left Eastern Europe (and) nine out of ten chose the United States as their destination (Gay, 1996, p. 3). Reasons for their interest in America differed from country to country, but these generally involved poverty, war, and social seclusion at home. For instance, the Romanian regime refused to grant its Jewish inhabitants the right of citizenship (Gay, 1996, p. 19) after the Russo-Turkish War, which established Romania as an independent kingdom in 1878. As a result, the Jewish American gangster rose after this period of immigration; the Jewish success in organized crime in the 1920s and 1930s [] transformed crime from a haphazard, small-scale activity into a [] well-financed business operation (Brodkin, 1998, p. 33). It all started with the talents of Arnold Rothstein and Big Jack Zelig, but these two came out of good solid middle class homes; others completely circumvented youth gangs in arriving at their criminal vocations (Fried, 1980, p. 40). The gangster genre portrayed Jewish gangsters like in Frieds description as early as 1928 with William Nighs Four Walls. Sergio Leones Once Upon a Time in America, though, would staple the rise of the Jewish American through an epic tale of how a group of people went after their share of the American dream, in the only way that bright but uneducated, streetwise males knew how to proceed (Brode, 1995, p. 101). Shadoian describes Leones characters as a group of thugs who take their ghetto life of hard survival as a springboard of how to get ahead: exercising power, racking up profits, [] (and) never thinking twice of the justifiability of violence (2003, p. 285). The film starts chronologically-wise by portraying the origins of the youth gang they form in order to protect themselves from the brutality of their environment (Mason, 2002, p. 143), and these ghettos deliver the immigrant experience as soon as they appear on screen, since the Lower East Side (as the neighborhood is called) underworld was a culture of young people (Fried, 1980, p. 36). Noodles (Robert DeNiro) and Maxs (James Woods) youth gang and lifestyle are exhibited through the formers flashbacks. A similar environment to the one in Gangs, Leones Lower East Side is firstly seen when a young Noodles chases after a young Deborah. However, the labor in
America is dissimilar to
Gangs in various levels. Jewish workforce is immediately identifiable between the crowds, and it correlates with Gays description: many Jewish couples opened little stores in the neighborhoods where they lived groceries, dry goods, butchers, fish stores (1996, p. 159). In other words, immigrant jobs appeared to improve in the social scale since the mid-19th century, but they were not any easier. It must be noted that this was during the American industrial revolution and immigrants became its factory workers [] (and) the majority of mining [] workers (Brodkin, 1998, p. 55). These jobs were the main reason why immigration to America in the early 20th century sounded promising, but the dissatisfaction of six or seven dollars a week (Fried, 1980, p. 7) founded the ascension of organized crime. Prohibition is the films epicenter, and this was an era of the illegalization of manufacturing and selling alcohol, which fostered the growth of large-scale enterprises that could monopolize production and distribution, just as a few [] corporations dominated the steel, oil, and automobile industries (Newburn, 2007, p. 409). Prohibition is referenced a few of scenes later, where Noodles, Max, and the rest of the gang develop a floating device that would guarantee their success in the art of bootlegging. After witnessing that their device works, a scene follows in which their clothing switches from old rags to distinguished suits. Their rise and their background is comparable to Waxey Gordons, a Jewish gangster who worked for one or another of the gangs that still roamed the neighborhood streets, variously as a labor goon, strikebreaker, dope peddler, burglar, extortionist, etc; prohibition allowed him to add booze to his repertoire (Fried, 1980, pp. 94-95). In fact, Fried uncovers the irony behind the Prohibition, since banning the devils drink served as the catalyst for the rise of Jewish American gangsters as shown in
America. He writes: prohibition had come along [] (and) we observed the effects of change: how the Waxey Gordons of America had been raised from obscurity to wealth and power, how [] Jewish gangsters had been granted a [] new lease on life (1980, p. 132). Without the Prohibition, gangster criminality may have been contained to only gambling and prostitution, with the latter taking place in
America after a beat cop steals (the gangs) booty, (and) they catch him having sex with the underage prostitute Peggy (Julie Cohen) and blackmail him into cooperation (Yaquinto, 1998, p. 145).