Levi Strauss 1829-1902

  May is Jewish American Heritage Month celebrating the contributions of Jewish Americans who have helped weave the fabric of American history, culture, and society.

  Levi Strauss was born Lob Strauss in 1829 in the Franconian region of Bavaria. In 1847 he and family members emigrated to New York's Kleindeutschland where they worked the wholesale dry goods trade.

  By 1850 he was called Levi. News of the Gold Rush prompted him to move to San Francisco in 1853, where he established Levi Strauss@Co., importing dry goods to sell to the small stores of the West.

  In 1873 he partnered with Latvian native Jacob Davis (1831-1908), a Reno tailer. The two men received a U.S. patent for workmen's trousers made with rivets on May 20th that year, inventing what we now
know as blue jeans. Levi continued to head his firm through the rest of the nineteenth century, eventually bringing his nephews into the business.

(Text courtesy of National Museum of American Jewish History, learn more at www.nmajh.org.)