JEWS AND BOOZE: The Fascinating History of Jews and Alcohol.

While the vast majority of Jews had nothing to do with organized crime or bootlegging, Jewish mobsters played a disproportionately large role in the illegal alcohol business. The most prominent Jew in the bootlegging business was an Eastern European immigrant named Meyer Lansky who had teamed up with the Italian American mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano to develop the National Crime Syndicate in the U.S.

Across the border in Canada the production and sale of alcohol was completely legal, and Lansky saw this as a great source of booze for the American market. His number one supplier in Canada was Sam Bronfman. The Bronfman family, also from Eastern Europe, had immigrated to Montreal and acquired the Canadian Seagram’s Distillery Company in the early 1920’s. Sam Bronfman turned Seagram into a very profitable enterprise in no small part due to prohibition.

The challenge for Lansky was how to smuggle the alcohol into America. The safest route was by water, across Lake Erie, the smallest of the Great Lakes, located on the border between the U.S. and Canada. So much booze was smuggled across that lake by Bronfman to Lansky that it was nicknamed “the Jewish Lake.”

Bronfman did all right by himself: The Seagram Building on Park Ave. was completed in 1958. “In 2001, architecture critic Herbert Muschamp referred to it as ‘the Building of Two Millenniums,’ writing that it encompassed ‘everything essential in Western architecture.’”