In its 1997 profile of Goldman Sach’s leading research analyst, Abby Joseph Cohen, The New York Times opened with the following depiction: “a motherly looking woman in a suit and spectacles catches a commuter bus with her teen-age daughter in Flushing, Queens.” Before expounding that she was a woman who regularly ‘moved markets’ with her predictions in Fortune and Business Week, television interviews and articles, the profile gave the final words to a male colleague, who claimed, her true gift is that “she uses her brainpower to be helpful to others… She’s the ideal Jewish mother.” Much has been written about Abby Joseph Cohen, her predictions, and her acumen, but no one has yet to explore how gender and Jewishness intersected to shape her experience and those of other women in the world of American investment banking.
Recent work continues to bemoan how women constitute 52 percent of entry-level finance jobs, but remain underrepresented in most positions of power in finance; few pay enough attention to the careers and depiction of those women recognized as powerful forces in the field, like Abby Joseph Cohen. Female leaders on Wall Street are overwhelmingly Jewish. How did Jewishness help or hinder their careers on Wall Street? What is meant by describing one of the longest-serving partners at Goldman Sachs as an ‘ideal Jewish mother”? My paper, based on qualitative sources (20 hours of interviews with Cohen and her peers), argues that firms with predominately partners from Jewish backgrounds, did offer Jewish women opportunities in the late-twentieth century, because of their differing embedded perceptions on gender, religion and work. This builds on my other work, which grapples with how has the financial sector in the United States – both real and imagined – has been shaped by religious, ethnic and cultural cleavages.