I just came across Werner J. Cahnman's Jews and Gentiles: A Historical Sociology of Their Relations (2004) and Hasia R. Diner's new book The Jews of the United States, 1654-2000 (2004) in the New Books section here at the library. I will check these out and post interesting excerpts as usual.

Jews did not assimilate like other immigrant groups. They assimilated America into Jewry.

"Negotiating between American and Jewish identities, they operated with a sense of empowerment. They did not believe that they had to accept America as it was, nor did they see Judaism as a fixed entity that they could not mold to fit their needs. They could put their impress on both to ease the traumas of accomodation and to bring the two into harmony."

Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States: 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp.1-2

Jewish historians fully acknowledge the existence of disruptive Jewish radicals and the movements they have spawned. So why can't the shabbos goy?

"Other Jews, from the most observant to the most politically radical, had little interest in America, its values, institutions, and practices. They expressed disdain for what they saw as the shallowness of American culture, the cruelties of its economic system, and the seductive power of its popular culture."

Ibid., p.2

Jewish historians fully acknowledge Jewish hate and opposition to the National Origins Act, which many Jewish organisations held to be responsible for 'The Holocaust'. This was the fundamental reason why mainstream organised American Jewish organisations pushed so hard to liberalise America's immigration laws. A racially and ethnically homogeneous America was perceived as being 'bad for the Jews'. On the other hand, a racially and ethnically diverse America was perceived as being 'good for the Jews' because it would weaken America's white gentile majority population. Notice how the quotas that prevented the Judaisation of America are mentioned and resented here. It was just the breakdown of such quotas, the rise of Jews to positions of power within our culture (e.g., in the media, financial institutions, law firms, academia et al) that is the fundamental cause of the present cultural degeneracy.

"And yet anti-Semitism reared its head in America too and left its mark on the Jews. While racist talk did not translate into direct political action against the Jews as it did in Europe, a series of social and governmental policies, culminating in the 1920s in the immigration quota system written into the National Origins Act and the quota systems in colleges and universities, hospitals, and law firms, limited -- or eliminated -- Jewish entry. This meant that Jews shaped their life choices in part around a set of options informed by the fact that they were Jews."

Ibid., p.3

Jotting this one down for the record . . .

"But the influx of poor Jews into England posed a dilemma to the Sephardic elite. On the one hand they felt and unquestioned responsibility to other Jews. They believed, as had Jews for centuries, in the Talmudic dictate "All of Israel are responsible for the other."Ibid., p.18

Some documentation here on how Christianity fostered religious divisions within white colonial Americans, principally, how this benefited The Hive by lowering their visibility.

"These Protestant-dominated colonies expended much more energy restricting Catholics than they did Jews. The colonial experience itself owed much more of its cultural dynamic to the aftershocks of the Reformation than to any dispute between Christianity and Judaism."Ibid., p.24

Another traditional American weakness and vulnerability has been the elevation of economics above all other concerns and life, or in other words, greed.

What outweighed religious identity involved someone's willingness and ability to produce goods and services that made a profit for the colony. . . Niether the colonies nor the Christians who lived in them believed in universal principles of religious liberty and freedom of expression. Rather, they believed in economic activity and commercial robustness. Religious intolerance basically interferred with the task of extracting raw materials from the land, processing them, and making them available for imperial markets.
Ibid.

Some info on Jewish involvement in the colonial slave trade:

A mark both of the Jews' inclusion as whites and of their worldwide involvement in trade was the fact that like their white neighbours in New York, Georgia, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Jews owned slaves. A 1703 census in New York found that fully 75 percent of the Jewish households contained slaves, averaging about two per family.Ibid., p.26

From the beginning of their settlement in the Americas, Jews were distinct in that they segregated themselves from the gentile population.

The Jews lived in close proximity to each other in the five cities, forming small enclaves. None of the American colonies mandated that their small band of Jews live in European-style ghettos, but Jews voluntarily sought each other out when looking for a place to settle.Ibid., p.28

Jewish success in business is significantly related to the strength of their communities and the level of their ethnic consciousness. More on the power of The Hive here:

Offenders could be fined and their access to the community's services suspended for a period of time. The most potent weapon the parnassim wielded was that of excommunication. Not only could they deny individuals who had violated congregational rules access to communal services, but they could completely deny transgressors the company of other Jews.Ibid., p.33

An interesting excerpt on Jewish collectivism.

The group gave shape to the lives of its members, and the community, the kahal, as embodied in the congregation, functioned as the all-inclusive focus of social life. For centuries Jews had been enmeshed in communities with the legal power to exercise their authority on individual Jews and their households.
Ibid.

More on Judaism-as-economic-strategy here.

Because Jews needed other Jews not only for religious reasons -- marriage, burial, common prayer, circumcision -- but also for business purposes, the parnassim as enforcers of community discipline had considerable power at their command. Dissent, by necessity, remained at bay.
Ibid., p.34

On how American capitalism weakened gentile resistance to Jewish penetration:

Unlike in Europe, the American colonies had no ghetto walls segregating the Jews from the rest of society that would need to be razed when circumstances changed. They had no legacy of guilds that excluded Jews from making a living.Ibid., p.38

Some documentation on the numbers of Jews in the American colonies on the verge of the Revolution.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed, about 2,500 Jews, out of a population of 2,500,000 Americans, lived in the former colonies.Ibid., p.40

This book, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (2004) by Hasia R. Diner, is part of a larger series, Jewish Communities in the Modern World. So it may profit the gallery to pick up these other books and flip through them, to see if we can find any useful information.

1. The Jews of Modern France, by Paula E. Hyman
2. Sephardi JewryK A History of the Judeo-Spanish Commuity, 14th-20th Centuries, by Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue
3. The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, by Todd M. Endelman