Too Big to Fail in 1930: Jews, Antisemitism, and the Collapse of the Bank of United States

The CSULB Jewish Studies Program is delighted to sponsor a talk by Dr. Rebecca Kobrin on Thursday, March 3^rd at 7:00 pm (over Zoom). Her topic will be: “Too Big to Fail in 1930: Jews, Antisemitism, and the Collapse of the Bank of United States.”

Founded in 1913 by Joseph Marcus, the Bank of United States, despite its grandiose name, was actually a commercial bank run by Jewish immigrants and drew most of its clients from New York City’s Jewish immigrant neighborhoods. By 1930, it rapidly expanded to become the largest commercial bank in New York, with over 440,000 depositors and $300 million in assets. When it faced hard times in December 1930, the New York Federal Reserve decided not to bail it out, and let it close its doors, sparking protests throughout New York City. Many economists see the failure of this bank as propelling the United States from the recession of 1929 into the Great Depression.

Who were the ‘untrustworthy’ Jewish men who ran the bank or the depositors that the members of the Federal Reserve refused to help?  Virtually erased in discussions of this historic bank failure are its ties to the Jewish immigrant banking world. This talk will explore how the bonds of ethnicity shaped banking in mid-twentieth-century America and how will show how anti-Semitism and other prejudices among America’s banking elite pushed the banking establishment to allow some banks to fail while others to be “saved.”  In the age before the FDIC, depositors who held money in banks that were allowed to fail appreciated the inequality in the system as they saw the role of religion and immigrant status played in deciding who were the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in America’s evolving banking world. 

Dr. Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History and works in the fields of immigration history and American Jewish History. She is the author of Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2010), which won the Jordan Schnitzer Prize, for the best book in modern Jewish History.  She also edited Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (Rutgers University Press,2012), and co-edited Purchasing Power: The Economics of Jewish History (University of Pennsylvania Press, Spring 2015).

This will be our annual Dr. Arlene Lazarowitz Memorial Lecture.  Dr. Lazarowitz founded the CSULB Jewish Studies Program in 1999 and also established our monthly lecture series.  She passed away in 2017, and this annual lecture celebrates her memory by bringing in noted scholars of her field of American Jewish history and political science to speak to the community.

Like all Jewish Studies talks, this event is free and open to the public. 

Zoom link:   https://csulb.zoom.us/j/86267415079