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Metal Fatigue: American Bosch and the Demise of Metalworking in the Connecticut River Valley, by Robert Forrant

overemphases on immigrant agency and the direct continuity of old-country culture in the new. But Lederhendler may go too far in discarding the idea of immigrant agency. Certainly, people’s choices were severely circumscribed by the socioeconomic and political situations they found themselves in. But that does not mean that they did not make choices or that their collective choices did not influence the larger structures in which they lived and worked. The garment unions formed by Jewish (and other) workers are a case in point. And if the immigrant workers and union leaders had a say in shaping their own institutions, their life experiences in the old country likely had some impact on the direction they took, even if that impact was not a direct or obvious one. Some of the sources that Lederhendler cites can easily be read to support the view that far from lacking an experience of class, Jewish immigrants brought intense class resentments with them. Likewise, Lederhendler is too quick to dismiss the cultural distinctiveness of American Jewry, a distinctiveness that may now be fading, but which lasted for several generations at least and manifested itself, for example, in a commitment to New Deal liberalism that was deeper and more abiding than in most other predominantly white communities. To note these historically contingent cultural distinctions is hardly ‘essentialist’ as Lederhendler argues. Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism sets an important agenda of issues to debate, but the debate is likely to continue for a while.