Well, the title tells it everything.
Lets talk about them.
What do we know about them?(past and present)

No such thing.

Seriously? What about Eastman Gang? The Purple Gang?

It was during Prohibition that Jewish gangsters became major operatives in America.

where should I start?

The Jewish Mafia was very strong before being overwhelmed by the Italian Mafia

Arnold Rothstein (January 17, 1882 – November 6, 1928),nicknamed "the Brain","transformed organized crime from a thuggish activity by hoodlums into a big business, run like a corporation, with himself at the top." Rothstein was allegedly responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series and was the master of Lucky Luciano.

Meyer Lansky (July 4, 1902 – January 15, 1983) friend of Luciano and up to the end he was one of the most powerful mafia associates

Murder, Inc. Jewish Members

Louis "Lepke" Buchalter - original head of Murder, Inc.

Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel the men that created Las Vegas
Abe "Kid Twist" Reles
Martin "Buggsy" Goldstein
Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss
Mendy Weiss
Hyman "Curly" Holtz
Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro
Louis Cohen
Louis "Shadow" Kravitz
Philip "Little Farvel" Kovolick
Samuel "Red" Levine

Dutch Schultz (August 6, 1901 – October 24, 1935) a prohibition boss,killed by the mafia because his violent nature and because asked the ok for kill prosecutor dewey.

Meyer Harris "Mickey" Cohen (September 4, 1913 – July 29, 1976) was a gangster based in Los Angeles and part of the Jewish Mafia, and also had strong ties to the American Mafia from the 1930s through 1960s.

Jewish urban gangs were much bigger than Italian gangs before Prohibition, and dominated urban rackets. Because of their size and influence, Jewish gangs also dominated the booze trade and other rackets in most cities during Prohibition. In NYC: Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, as well as Dutch Shultz. In New Jersey: Abner (Longy) Zwillman. In Boston: Charles (King) Solomon). In Detroit: The Purple Gang (Davey Bernstein and his brothers). In Cleveland: The Mayfield Road gang, headed by Moe Dalitz. In Philadelphia: Moe Annenberg. Jewish mobs also were big in booze and other rackets in Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco and LA. Even in Chicago, a Jew, Jack Guzik, was mentor and second in command to Capone.

After Prohibition was repealed, most Jewish gangsters went "legit," although Lansky continued to sit with (although he was not a member of) the Commission and advise various Dons, especially Luciano and Costello. Louis (Lepke) Bucholter, who some say was the wealthiest gangster of the Thirties, dominated the garment and trucking rackets in NYC. The biggest "legit" opportunities for Jewish gangsters was Nevada gaming. Although Siegel gets most of the credit, the real builder of Las Vegas was Dalitz.

Aren't there a lot of Jews in the Russian Mafia? Granted, many Russian mobsters pretended to be Jews in order to gain asylum outside the USSR. Nonetheless, my general sense is that most "Russian" mobsters are in fact ethnically Jewish . . . .

You had it right in the first part of your post. Most "Jewish" gangsters in the American Russian Mafia are ethnic Russians who used fake Jewish internal (to the USSR) passports to escape under provisions of the Jackson/Vanik Act of 1974.

The prime example is Marat Balagula, who was the top Russian mobster in Brooklyn for a while. He claimed to be Jewish on his exit application. But "Marat" is not a Jewish surname. "Balagula" is slang for "gangster," or "roughneck." The clever bastard put "Marat the Gangster" on his passport application, and the Soviet authorities bought it.

Good stuff guys.

What about nowadays? Any gangs or jewish members in any criminal groups? Leaving aside the Israeli mafia.

You can't make this shit up. You really can't. I guess Russian bureaucrats are just as stupid as their American counterparts .

Well, I must disagree with Turnbull on this one. According to most stuff that I have read about the Russian mafia in New York, it is a close-knit group composed primarily of Jews from Odessa and nearby towns in the Urkaine (i.e., ethnic Jews who identify as Russian and who are probably atheistic)

Turnbull, do you have a source for your claim that Marat Balagula was not in fact Jewish?

Dominic, all citizens of the former Soviet Union had to carry internal passports that, among other things, listed their Republic of National Origin--Ukraine, Georgia, Turkmenistan, etc. But Jews, no matter where they were born, carried passports stamped "Jew." This was a perfect reflection of Soviet anti-Semitism, starting with Stalin, who regarded Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans." It was a sure way to keep Jews at the bottom of the social, political and economic heap in the USSR, and make them scapegoats for the regimes' failures. It also served the Russian mobs as a way to keep would-be Jewish members out--they were among the worst anti-Semites in the USSR.

Passage of the Jackson/Vanik Act in 1974 suddenly made Jewish internal passports worth more than gold--any holder could freely emigrate from the USSR to the US or Israel. The mobs, which controlled the USSR's huge counterfeiting industry (people needed reams of "official documentation" to do any kind of business in the USSR) started churning out fake Jewish internal passports to escape. That's how Russian gangsters set themselves up in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach. It also led to the stereotype (bigotry by any other name) that all or most Russian gangsters in Brighton Beach were or are Jewish, simply because they came to America under the Jackson/Vanik Act.

As for Marat Balagula: I didn't grow up with him. But I can tell you that Eastern European Jews are very particular about how they name their children: they use surnames of deceased relatives in the belief that doing so keeps the memory of the deceased relative alive through later generations. Most American Jews are of Eastern European origin. I promise you that you won't find one whose name was or is "Marat."

Turnbull, one of my closest friends is a Jew who was born in Kiev, grew up on Brighton Beach, his first name is Marat, and his last name is very Jewish

Or consider the NBA referee Marat Kogut, born in the Ukraine, grew-up in Brooklyn, and a Jew

Consider the controversial Russian Jew art gallerist Marat Guelman, born in Moldavia.

Consider Marat Grinberg, professor Russian literature at Reed College -- "Marat Grinberg, Associate Professor of Russian and Humanities and current chair of the department of Russian, has been teaching at Reed since 2006. He holds a BA in Modern Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America . . . . Professor Grinberg specializes in Russian Jewish literature and culture, [and] he is the author of "I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left": The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (Academic Studies Press, 2011, 2013) and a co-editor of the forthcoming Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (Brandeis University Press, 2013). His current book length project is the investigation of Jewishness and intertextuality in cinema. Marat Grinberg regularly offers comparative seminars in Jewish literature as well as courses in Russian poetry and 19th century Russian prose. "

Why so many Russian Jewish Marat's? Perhaps because of the parallel between the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins. In fact, Jean-Paul Marat is widely believed to have been a Jew, certainly in the anti-Semitic literature. See, for instance, Drumont, "Le France Juive," where he claims that the Jacobin's real family name was "Mara" and that once the family settled in Switzerland they became Protestant so as not to reveal their Jewish origins. Taine & Celine also claimed that Marat was a Jew.

Even though some would say that the modern-day book "Red Mafiya" is anti-semitic, its author Robert Friedman is Jewish, and he clearly thinks that most of the Russian mafia is Jewish

Moreover, do you really think that perfectly respectable books like "History of the Jews in Brooklyn," published by Brandeis Univ Press, would be mistaken about so elementary a fact as whether most Russian mobsters in Brooklyn were Jewish, including Marat Balagula

Were you at their B'rit Milah or Bar Mitzvah?
The Nazi ideologue and Minister for Occupied Eastern Territories, who was executed after the Nuremberg trials, had a "very Jewish" name: Alfred Rosenberg.

One of the most tragic consequences of Russian anti-Semitism has been the loss of true Jewish identity and values. Nazi genocide and official Soviet anti-Semitism simultaneously suppressed the practice of Judaism and ascribed to anyone with anything remotely "Jewish" in their backgrounds every kind of crime and transgression, the better to scapegoat them for the failures of the regime. Those forged "Jew" internal passports that gangsters employed to escape the USSR just spread the lies. The Big Lie never fails to gain traction everywhere that bigotry flourishes--meaning everywhere in the world.

I cited a long list of Jewish gangs and gangsters in America in earlier posts in this thread. They flourished for the same reasons that Irish, Italian and Chinese gangs flourished: lack of opportunity in the legitimate world coupled with a surfeit of opportunity to exploit the weaknesses of their fellow ethnics and/or co-religionists. There were and are Jewish gangsters in America and Russia. But to use "Jewish Mafia" as a blanket descriptor of Russian organized crime is to play right into the hands of the bigots.

Most of the Russian Mafia in New York is ethnically Jewish, plus some Georgian groupings. But most are Jewish. This does not make it a "Jewish Mafia" as such, but if one wanted to cite examples of Jewish gangsters, both past and present, then it is surely reasonable to mention the Russian Mafia in New York.

Again, can you cite a source or authority for your claim that Marat Balagula was not Jewish, or that most of the men he employed were not Jewish?

Turnbull's word is good enough for me. There are some subjects that I would never even question Turnbull on. This is one of them.

I do not think that Turnbull is relying on street knowledge. Therefore, he should cite an authority, a book, an article, for his claims.

Balagula was definitely Jewish. His later rival Vyacheslav Ivankov was not a Jew.

Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, a greater percentage of Russian immigrants to NYC have been gentiles, and with this a greater percentage of gentiles in the mafia

But on the whole, the Russian mafia in New York is a predominantly Jewish affair. This is a fact. And to state simple facts does not constitute or "feed" anti-Semitism. On the contrary, white-washing certain facts promotes anti-semitism as to do so breeds a mindset where facts do not matter

Right on.

Organized crime groups with origins in Ukraine often are Jewish, Moscow gangs are mostly not. There were also Moscow gangsters, who didn't have a drop of Jewish blood in them, that acquired Israeli passports. Sergei Mikhailov is the most famous example of course.

I don't live in New York so what I know might mean nothing, but from what I've read the vast majority of "Russian" gangsters in Brooklyn came from or were at least connected to Odessa. Odessa was probably the main centre for organized criminal activity in Ukraine back then. And the majority of the Odessa gangsters (and the Odessa-connected ones) were indeed Jewish. The Odessa group is also a different animal than the Moscow-based groups such as the Solntsevskaya or Izmaylovskaya gangs that later spread to the USA and that consist -with some exceptions of course- for the most part of ethnic Russians. They might have connections to each other of course.

Here in Belgium, in Antwerp there were also members of the Ukrainian group active for some time: Rachmiel Brandwain, Moshe Ben-Ari, the Nayfeld brothers (who were actually from Gomel in Belarus but belonged to the "Ukrainian" gangs),...are some examples. All of them were indeed Jewish and were heavily criticized and shunned by local rabbis and most of the Orthodox Jewish community.
Granted there were also other "Russian" gangs active in the city. The Georgians were also a main factor in Antwerp organized crime. Some of them were Jewish (the Melikhovs for instance), but the vast majority were not. The Solntsevskaya guys had a presence and there were also some Chechen and Armenian gangs. All of these gangs mostly cooperated. An example being a Georgian jeweler (sometimes a Jew, mostly not) selling some jewels to a costumer before a Chechen gang robbed the costumer and brought the same jewels back to another connected Georgian jewelrer.
All of those gangs that came from the former Soviet Union are described as "Russian mafia", while only the Moscow gangs are for the most part ethnically Russian. And those groups, like the Solntsevskaya for instance, aren't even a "mafia" in the strict sense of the word.

Good stuff, fellas.