Blue Jeans and the American Dream:​ The Story of Levi Strauss

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When his father died in 1846, Levi Strauss was left with few opportunities as a Jewish youth in his native Bavaria and so he left with his mother and sisters for New York where he joined his brothers’ modest dry good business. A few years later he moved to San Francisco to run the west coast branch of the family firm. Levi went on to build up a successful business and to become a well-respected, millionaire philanthropist while popularizing a new form of clothing: blue jeans.

Host: Samantha

Further Reading

Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, University of California Press, (2004).

Lynn Downey, Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, University of Massachusetts Press, (2016).
 
Fred Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area, University of California Press, (2009).

Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)

Levi Strauss @Wikimedia Commons