The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire

by Adam D. Mendelsohn,
The Jerusalem Post, February 13, 2015

In 1853, after a sojourn in California and a visit to Melbourne, Australia, William Kelly concluded that clothing marts resembled Jewish synagogues. “When running the scent of wearing apparel,” Kelly wrote, the Hebrews “congregated in a dense mass about the pulpit, hawking a valueless lot of damaged baragon jackets.” In sales of merchandise, especially garments “in the lower grades of fashion, they fairly outstrip and distance all competition.”