Alan "Grecco" Wolshonak

[Don Mosseria]

Thanks. Do you know from elsewhere that SanFilippo was half Irish?

I can't remember where I got that from honestly, I guess there is a chance I totally made it up in my head considering the blonde hair, the fair skin (reason he was called Whitey) and the fact he grew up in the Irish neighborhood of Bath Beach. Bath Beach was all Irish before the Italians totally displaced them.

Maybe one of the genealogical experts can do a search on Jennie Abrams and come up with something.

I recall looking into SanFilippo before and it wasn’t clear to me whether Jennie Abrams was specifically Irish or Anglo/Scottish, German. But she was definitely not Italian.

You don’t think she was Jewish then? According to Wikipedia:

Abrams is a surname related to Abrahams, Abram, Abrahm and Abraham. It developed independently in the Jewish diaspora, England, Germany and the Netherlands.

Would be interesting to know in relation to B’s question above about what ethnicities were deemed acceptable to be mixed with Italian. What software do you use for genealogical research? Ancestry.com? I may have a go myself. I’ve done some personal family tree research on it before.

[Don Mosseria]

Abrams is a surname related to Abrahams, Abram, Abrahm and Abraham. It developed independently in the Jewish diaspora, England, Germany and the Netherlands.

Sorry, my mistake. I misread it as it developed “in the Jewish diaspora IN England…”, but it means it developed “in the Jewish diaspora AND IN England…”. Ignore my previous message.

[CornerBoy]

who gives a shit iff he's a rican or not. I wanna know if he's nonbinary or not

[johnny_scootch]

Would be interesting to know in relation to B’s question above about what ethnicities were deemed acceptable to be mixed with Italian.

The Italians mixed with the Irish quite a bit and Irish was much more acceptable than most other ethnicities due to the fact they were Roman Catholic just like the Italians. Religion was a major major factor in those days.

[PolackTony]

Would be interesting to know in relation to B’s question above about what ethnicities were deemed acceptable to be mixed with Italian.

The Italians mixed with the Irish quite a bit and Irish was much more acceptable than most other ethnicities due to the fact they were Roman Catholic just like the Italians. Religion was a major major factor in those days.

Religion was a huge factor. Catholics as a whole, and particularly immigrants, were held with suspicion by the Anglo-Protestant majority back in the day. Depending on the community, Italians naturally also readily intermarried with Polish, Catholic Germans, Croatians, along with the Irish. By the 1950s, there were a lot of mixed families like this and as people moved from the old inner-city ethnic ghettoes to the suburbs they often attended mixed Parishes. While one sees some marriages with Anglos, Jews, and Greeks, these were much less common, despite the fact that Italian mobsters often had no problem working closely with Jewish and Greek gangsters.

I’m not sure that a guy with a Jewish mother would necessarily be less likely to be inducted than a guy with an Irish or Polish mother, as there were just far fewer of the former around, though at least being Catholic on both sides would make you less “alien” I’d imagine.

[CornerBoy]

lots of half jewish, half italian ppl as many italian men married jewish women.

That's been common for the last 90 yrs

[Don Mosseria]

lots of half jewish, half italian ppl as many italian men married jewish women.

That's been common for the last 90 yrs

Yeah, fair point. I think the point being made was that while there have been Italian-Jewish marriages, and there have been many important Jewish associates, not many half-Italian half-Jewish people seem to have been inducted (or half-Hispanic for example, which would seem to speak against Catholicism being the deciding factor). John Gotti Jr. being 25% Jewish is a clear example, but the question was are there other examples? Half-Irish seems to be the most common (though I have to say, a lot of these apparently half-Irish people seem to have names that actually trace back to England, not Ireland - Porter, Veasey, possibly Abrams).