building a beautiful building. When we finish, we’ll have everything.” How they listened to me! They loved me. They believed me. We had grown up together. 75 She believed it too. She meant every word. But she was also right about the difference in material conditions—a difference caused by America’s greater wealth and Jewish American economic success. The Jews had done well in America—much better, in fact, than any other immigrant community and better, as far as social mobility was concerned, than most native-born Americans. The Russian Jews were the latest, largest, and most specialized of the Mercurian immigrants, and they acted and succeeded accordingly. They arrived as families (about 40 percent of the Jewish immigrants were female, and 25 percent children); intended to stay (the average rate of repatriation from the United States was 7 percent for the Jews, 42 percent for everyone else); became fully urbanized; took almost no part in the competition for unskilled jobs; included an extraordinarily high proportion of entrepreneurs (in New York in 1914, every third male immigrant); and did business the old-fashioned Mercurian way—by relying on cheap family labor, long hours, low profit margins, ethnic solidarity, vertical integration, and extremely high rates of standardization, specialization, and product differentiation. In New York, in particular, the Russian Jewish immigrants took advantage of their traditional skills and old-country experience to monopolize and revolutionize the clothing industry (in 1905 the city’s largest, worth $306 million and employing one-fourth of New York’s industrial labor force). By 1925, 50 percent of New York’s Russian Jewish heads of households were in white-collar occupations, almost exclusively through entrepreneurship. As Andrew Godley put it, “most Jewish immigrants . . . rose from the direst of poverty to positions of economic security and social respectability within fifty years when most of those around them did not.” 76 The story was a familiar one: business success followed by success in the educational system and the professions. At the end of World War I, Harvard’s Jewish enrollment was about 20 percent, and Columbia’s about 40 percent. In 1920, City College of New York and Hunter College were 80 to 90 percent Jewish. In 1925, more than 50 percent of the children of Jewish immigrant businessmen had white-collar jobs that required formal education. According to an Industrial Commission report, “In the lower schools the Jewish children are the delight of their teachers for cleverness at their books, obedience, and general good conduct.” And according to one bemused Boston prep school student, “Jews worked far into each night, their lessons next morning were letter perfect,