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Philip Cantor had the audience repeat the refrain "Oy it's a shande," (Yiddish for "shame") before delving into the dark underbelly of American Jewish history in his lecture, "Jews in the World of Crime."

The lecture took place Aug. 10 at the Monroe Township Jewish Center as part of the 12th annual American Jewish Experience lecture series of the Jewish Historical Society of Central New Jersey.

Cantor, a Jewish educator and past president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County, entertained and surprised the audience as he spoke on the history of American Jewish pilfering, pinching, and purloining.

He began his lecture by defining what constitutes what "a crime."

"A crime is something that we say is a crime," said Cantor. "It is in the eye of the beholder and where the line is drawn in the sand."

Criminality, Cantor explained, has been a reality of American Jewish life. When Jews emigrated en masse from Eastern Europe to New York's Lower East Side beginning in the 1880s and continuing through the mid-1920s, the recent newcomers faced poverty and discrimination.

Not allowed to enter the professions along with the desperation famously captured in Jacob Riis's "How the Other Half Lives," many Jews felt compelled to take to crime in order to support themselves. However, as Cantor emphatically reminded the audience, Jews were as susceptible as any other group who faced similar obstacles. Nevertheless, while Jews constituted 25 percent of New York's population before the Second World War, Jews made up 50 percent of the population in the New York jails.

According to Cantor, the Academy Award-winning films "The Godfather" and its sequel, which dramatized Italian-American organized crime, could have just as easily been about Jewish-Americans. "Vito from Corleone could have been Moshe from Minsk," Cantor said, referencing the character famously portrayed by Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.

Cantor then recounted the story of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, perhaps the most famous of the Jewish gangsters. Lansky and Siegel, together with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, an Italian immigrant, formed one of the major syndicates of organized crime in the interwar period.

As Cantor noted, they were not alone in the story of Jewish organized crime in America. Many Jews, including Lansky and Siegel, were involved in the bootlegging business after the passage of the 18th amendment and Volstead Act, more colloquially known as Prohibition. The notorious Murder Inc., the assassination group that outsourced its services to the mob, was "an entirely Jewish operation."

While condemning the horrific actions of these gangsters, Cantor pointed out that many of these criminals retained strong Jewish identities and worked on behalf of the Jewish people. Lansky, for example, helped aid in the destruction of ships that imported weapons to Arab countries before Israel's founding. Mickey Cohen, another Jewish gangster of the interwar period, financially supported the Irgun, the militant Zionist group that operated in the decades before the founding of the state of Israel.

The decline of the Jewish gangster, which began in the 1930s, occurred due to several concurrent developments. First, second-generation American Jews faced considerably less discrimination than their elders and began to enter the professions at an unprecedented rate. Second, the anti-immigration restrictions of the mid-'20s essentially cut off the stream of Jewish immigration, drying up the well of new recruits that gangs could draw upon. Third, and for Cantor the most significant explanation of the decline, was the Holocaust. Jewish organized crime largely benefited from the global network of Jewish people, which Hitler decimated.

The lecture ended with a participatory discussion of the crimes of Bernie Madoff and the recent money laundering charges against several New Jersey and New York rabbis. For Cantor, the lessons to be drawn from the history of Jewish criminality are numerous and include the need for individual and group responsibility.

"Ultimately, we should be held to the standards that we set for ourselves," he said.

The American Jewish Experience lecture series takes place at the Monroe Township Jewish Center on the second Monday of the month at 10 a.m. and at the Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple in New Brunswick on the third Wednesday of the month.