More than a century ago, if you were a newly landed Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, you probably ended up on New York City’s Lower East Side. The tenement-heavy neighborhood couldn’t hold the nearly two million arrivals from Romania, Hungary, and the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1924, but it did anyway, leading to overcrowding, disease, and brute-force survival. For men, it often meant turning to crime, organized or otherwise. Women’s choices were even bleaker: sex work, as a prostitute or madam, or being kept by the rich. Dreams, if they weren’t snuffed out early, existed in the shadows. But one group saw things differently.
The community of richer, uptown German Jews was outraged when the 1912 murder of a gambler named Herman Rosenthal cast unwanted attention on the immigration influx, claiming these supposed undesirables would undo all of their progress and make life harder for Jews as a whole. The uptown Jews, who had embraced being fully American, could no longer side-eye their poorer, downtown, Yiddish-speaking brethren. They formed the Incorruptibles, a secret vice squad to stamp out crime and root out vice with every available method and means, no matter the cost.
