Remaking ourselves at home.

Moore, Deborah Dash

Columbia University Press published At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews, 1920-1940 as the first volume of a new series, the Columbia History of Urban Life, edited by Kenneth Jackson. Jackson established the series to pick up where Oxford University Press's Urban Life in America Series was leaving off. (2) This earlier series was dying at the time and he wanted to promote research and writing on cities, including New York. (3) A professor of urban history, Jackson arrived in 1968 at Columbia University, where I was a graduate student, though I never studied with him. He did, however, carefully read the manuscript version of the book. (4) At Home in America appeared in January 1981. Its research, writing, and rewriting occurred during the decade of the 1970s.

Jackson's decision to start his new series with a book on second-generation New York Jews explicitly affirmed their centrality to urban history. It validated my focus on the neighborhood as an organic unit of Jewish life in the city and my decision to begin the second-generation story with Jews' migration out of the Lower East Side. I drew on historians' theories of immigration to understand how Jewish migration among neighborhoods modified the development of community and ethnicity. Historians emphasized both the "push" and the "pull" that were prompting people to move, and they recognized how migrants carried cultural baggage that often was transformed by the encounter with a different society. (5) By contrast, sociological writing on areas of second settlement assumed that migration led directly to assimilation into American culture and society. (6) Instead, I argued for recognition of urban neighborhoods as the mediums--the physical, social, and economic spaces--in which ethnic cultures evolved. Jews crafted a sense of place in what urban historians at the time called the "inner city or streetcar suburb." Through their embrace of apartment house living, second-generation Jews helped to ensure the growth of an innovative and financially resilient urban culture. (7) I integrated into my narrative the roles of Jewish builders in fashioning the cityscape. Different types of multifamily housing--from modern tenements to elevator apartment buildings--gave form to a distinctive interpenetration of public and private lives. I noted the importance of class differences separating second-generation neighborhoods, but emphasized that more than class distinguished one Jewish area from another. Religious and political differences also shaped a neighborhood's character and, within any single section, significant Jewish variety flourished. Neighborhoods were far from homogeneous. So many Jews lived in New York City--roughly two million at its peak--that the city supported enormous Jewish diversity. Several of New York's neighborhoods housed as many Jews as the total Jewish population of many other American cities. Linking neighborhood, city, state, and nation, second-generation Jews developed a system of philanthropy that claimed to represent the "Jewish community."

New York Jews created both a vision and a practice of a multiethnic and multi-religious city. They linked their ideals and way of life to progressive politics that contributed ideas, values, and votes to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Second-generation Jews worked with Jewish and American local institutions to expand the city's commitment to religious and ethnic diversity. They especially looked to public schools, synagogues, and political clubs to sustain their synthesis. As second-generation Jews became public school teachers in significant numbers, they gradually modified aspects of public school curricula and rituals. Dedicated Jewish educators even gained recognition for aspects of Jewish culture, especially modern Hebrew language instruction. Their struggle for respect for Jewish values embedded in the rise of Zionism and modern Hebrew, supported by Jewish secondary school teachers, contributed to changing Christian assumptions that colored public school programs. Students and their parents welcomed the opportunity to learn Hebrew in high school. It bridged a gap between home and school. The Board of Education's willingness to offer Hebrew as an elective signaled its recognition of Jewish culture as worthy of inclusion as part of New York's cultural mix. As students had long studied Greek and Latin, so it also became possible for them to study Hebrew. Simultaneously, rabbis and Jewish laymen developed the synagogue center as a family-based religious institution where men and women, and children could extend the boundaries of Jewish religious life. Jews also established and joined political clubs that enabled them to gain leverage in city governance. They aimed not only to further their personal ambitions, but also to implement policies that would help workers as a class. In the process, Jews came to identify with and beyond their neighborhoods; they came to see themselves as Brownsville Jews, New York Jews, or American Jews, for example, with distinctive blended identities.

My book title argued a thesis: that New York Jews actually found themselves at home in America during decades of peak antisemitism. I did not ignore the forms of disdain and discrimination that Jews confronted in those years. However, I stressed the significance of their responses. Ronald Bayor had recently published a book on ethnic conflict in New York, and I did not need to repeat his account. (8) Instead, I answered a question that Irving Howe had asked in the eighteenth and final section of World of Our Fathers. He called this section "At Ease in America?" under the larger rubric of "Dispersion." (9) I pointed out that the census demonstrated how dispersal from the Lower East Side had coalesced into new Jewish concentrations in several diverse neighborhoods. Rather than evenly distributing Jews throughout the city, migration produced a concentrated dispersion and a greater segregation of Jews from other New Yorkers when calculated citywide. These patterns indicated the terms upon which Jews grew to be at home in America--less as an assimilated group than as an ethnically distinctive one. In my last chapter, I suggested that patterns established during the interwar years extended into the postwar decade.

In the early 1970S, I faced several interconnected and internally contradictory challenges in my quest to write a social and institutional history of second-generation New York Jews. First, I confronted the fact that historians had not found second-generation Jews very interesting. Why, I was often asked, would anyone want to write about them? I had to make a case for the second generation as a viable cohort. Most sociologists viewed the children of immigrants merely as a transitional generation. Second, and connected, I chose a relatively recent time period, less than fifty years into the past. Third, unlike immigrants, second-generation Jews did not fit into accepted measures of importance according to scholars of immigration. They possessed neither of the two attributes American historians considered to be defining characteristics of Jews: They did not speak or write Yiddish and they were not particularly observant of Jewish religious traditions. Never mind that nonobservance among New York Jews had taken root among immigrants in the nineteenth century. Popular opinion characterized the Lower East Side as the primary place where Judaism flourished. Fourth, unlike European Jews, who were considered authentic and, therefore, worthy subjects of study in the eyes of Jewish historians, New York Jews were mundane, ordinary, and even proste--"vulgar." Fifth, unlike romanticized portrayals of working-class socialist Jews, postwar social critics and left-leaning American historians had consigned middle-class Jews, along with middle-class, white Protestant Americans, to the heaps of American conformists, lacking any distinctive attributes not reducible to their class ambitions. Sixth, Zionist scholars regarded a diaspora city like New York as possessing few claims to importance. Finally, as a small minority in the United States, Jews stood at the margins of consciousness among American historians, even (one might say, especially) those who were themselves Jewish. It was not clear what studying this minority group might contribute to understanding the larger contours of American urban history. (In spite of the categorical disruptions inherent in Will Herberg's sociological study, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, historians of religion in America were having trouble moving much beyond the nineteenth-century paradigm of a Protestant America. (10))

By 1970, American Jews and Israeli Jews had developed competing stories about Jewish life in Eastern Europe prior to World War I, and about the prewar emigration of Jews to the United States and to the Yishuv (the community of Jewish settlers in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel). As many Christians sneered at Jews who failed to recognize Christ as their only hope for salvation as individuals, many Zionists attacked Eastern European Jews who failed to recognize Israel as their only hope for salvation as a people. Neither American nor Israeli Jews characterized the great migration of their parents and grandparents as an abandonment of a precious Jewish way of life; rather, they understood the existential necessity of these migrations. In contrast, critics described the movement of native-born American Jews to areas of second settlement as just such an abandonment, a forsaking of Yiddish culture and of observant Judaism. (11) Absent these two pillars of Jewish life, what was there to say about second-generation Americanizers? Much scholarly and popular writing characterized the topic of Americanization as a sorry tale of declension--of selling out, as it were. (11) Jewish life that mattered was associated with the life of immigrant Jews, their heroic struggle up from hard but hopeful poverty in the immigrant neighborhood of Manhattan's Lower East Side, a struggle that echoed their prior escape from persecution to the land of seductive opportunities.

Both Moses Rischin and Arthur Goren contributed significantly to our understanding of life among immigrant Jews in New York City. (13) Unfortunately, neither of these authors' books could help me to formulate a plan of research. In his study of Jewish immigrants in New York, Rischin focused on the Lower East Side, where the vast majority of newcomers had settled. Goren took the New York Kehillah ("community") as his organizational framework and used its rich resources to examine many dimensions of New York Jewish life. I could not focus on a single neighborhood, nor could I use a single organization as my lens to explore the complexity of second-generation Jewish life in interwar New York. (14) In addition, I needed to convince historians--both Jewish and not--that there was an important Jewish urban story to tell beyond one involving immigrants, especially at a time when immigration history had arrived as a legitimate field (the Immigration History Society dates from 1972). (15) In short, the decision to study second-generation Jews in New York City involved a measure of chutzpah.

Trained in the midst of the social history revolution, I began with the census in order to track patterns of residential settlement for my dissertation. They were vital for understanding Jews' choices of where to live, their occupations, and their household composition. Initially, I relied on urban planner Walter Laidlaw's estimates, which were based on a sampling of the religious population distribution of New York City. (16) His analysis of the 1920 and 1925 census proved to be a great help, because the 1925 New York State Census had never been compiled, due to lack of funds. (I went up to the Bronx County Courthouse to consult the manuscript census). I subsequently learned that Laidlaw had not sampled all boroughs for all years, but had only extrapolated information from Manhattan and the Bronx to Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Brooklyn, a key borough for the study of second-generation Jews, differed significantly from Manhattan and the Bronx. I needed to explain how New York Jews got to Upper Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, to move beyond the standard urban history explanation that emphasized the importance of public transportation.

A parallel transformation in the methods of oral history served this project as well. (17) I supplemented urban historical methodology with oral history interviews that allowed me to piece together narratives about how and why Jews moved to some neighborhoods but not to others. Without oral history interviews, I would not have met the Jewish builders who explained to me how they got started in the construction industry, how they chose housing styles, how they dealt with the various trades required to put up a building, how they financed their projects, and, finally, how they recruited tenants. I also turned to oral history to uncover some elusive political stories.

Columbia University had established its pioneering Columbia Center for Oral History Archives in 1948. The archives housed reminiscences of political figures, including a number of prominent New York Jews. (18) However, these interviews did not include many local figures, especially those involved in Brooklyn Democratic Party politics. The 1973 election of Abraham Beame as the first Jewish mayor of New York City understandably drew my attention to Brooklyn politics, especially to the role of the Democratic Party machine that had nurtured Beame's career. By this time, I realized that I possessed invaluable resources in my family, especially my mother's mother, who grew up in Brownsville prior to World War I, along with various relatives who had entered politics, including a cousin of my mother's, Elliott Golden, who was a judge in Brooklyn, and later a Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. (19) I understood that I should turn to family connections to open doors if I wanted to conduct my own oral history interviews. I had been schooled in these techniques while working on a research project conducted by the American Jewish Committee in 1972, during the final months of the campaign that led to the reelection of President Richard Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew. That election saw increasing numbers of New York Jews vote for Nixon, a marked change from previous presidential elections in which Republicans had attracted negligible Jewish support. (20)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Researching the history of New York Jews in the early 1970s meant traveling around the city. Archives held relatively little material, just enough to whet my appetite. To learn more about a synagogue's history, I had to go to the synagogue itself, where minutes and newsletters could be found. When I wanted to know about Jewish community centers, I went to the National Jewish Welfare Board. Its library held valuable sociological surveys of Jewish neighborhoods that proved more informative than the census. To master the history of the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies of New York City, I visited federation headquarters and combed through their old files. Often, I gained access to organizational records from staff members who knew either my parents or friends of my parents. Jewish organizations were staying put, even as many of them--such as synagogues on the Grand Concourse--were struggling with declining membership rolls. Their visible continuity undoubtedly contributed to my perception of urban Jewish ethnicity and its local roots. Entering these organizations' buildings, I examined their physical structures and use of space even as I observed how embedded they were in local neighborhoods. I sought to specify distinctive elements that set second-generation Jews apart from immigrant Jews and from non-Jewish New Yorkers.

Two important books have examined the history of New York Jews since my book appeared: Beth Wenger's New York Jews and the Great Depression and Eli Lederhendler's New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970. (21) Other historians have continued to examine Jewish immigrants in the city, uncovering fascinating and important aspects of immigrant Jewish life. A few have explored a specific segment of New York Jews, such as Jenna Weissman Joselit in her New York's Jewish Jews. (22) But until the recent publication of the three-volume City of Promises, a collaborative history of New York Jews for which I served as general editor, only Wenger and Lederhendler had tackled the subject of the city's Jews in all their complexity. (23) Wenger's book is a social history that analyzes Jewish responses to the economic and political pressures of the Great Depression. She shows how those years cast a dark shadow over New York Jewish life, even as Jews coped somewhat better than other ethnic groups. Lederhendler's cultural history documents extensive disillusionment among New York Jews. After World War II, the Jewish love affair with the city went sour, mostly in the face of African American and Puerto Rican migrations, events that made clear the limited flexibility of Jewish liberal politics. Lederhendler specifically questions the enduring relevance of the forms of urban Jewish ethnicity described in my book.

The dominant historical narrative of New York City in the 1970s now takes off from a fiscal crisis that came to a head in 1975, when the city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, and from the citywide blackout and riots in the Bronx and Brooklyn of 1977. These events cast harsh historical shadows forward and backward in time, extending a narrative of decay, desperation, and desertion. Leading up to that midpoint and taking their cues from what followed, historians have emphasized rapid decline in the fabric of urban life as New York drastically cut municipal services, hollowing out its former substantial commitment to a broad understanding of the public good. Housing abandonment, which began in the 1960s, culminated in the late 1970s, when whole Bronx neighborhoods burned. Deindustrialization, especially the wholesale departure of garment factories, radically changed the character of New York as a working-class town, a process that began in the postwar decades but accelerated in the late 1960s. Unemployment rose steadily, also starting in the late 1960s. However, increases in white-collar employment and a booming construction industry disguised these trends until the 1970s. In 1971, the city's 6.7-percent unemployment rate exceeded the national average for the first time in six years. Promising liberal experiments to extend a free college education to all high school graduates--the open admissions program--were inaugurated in 1970. The project collapsed six years later, when tuition fees were imposed throughout the City University of New York for the first time in the system's century-long history. Every index of municipal health declined. Crime rates soared, with the murder rate nearly tripling between 1965 and 1972.. The price of public transportation increased, in part because inexpensive public transit was viewed by "the financial community" as one of "the sacred cows" of New York's social democracy. Gradually, graffiti covered subway cars, making them unattractive to many riders and heightening a sense that danger lurked underground.

New York, in this historical overview, no longer appeared to be a hopeful place. Rather, it suffered from decline, and became a city on the skids rather than a city of promise to newcomers. For the first time, according to the 1980 decennial census, the city's population decreased. As historian Joshua Freeman observes, writing at the end of century, by 1980 "the social, ethical, and political environment of the city had been forever changed. In a few short years, financial leaders, politicians allied with them, and conservative intellectuals had succeeded in at least partially prying the city away from its working-class, social democratic heritage." (24) Jews figured prominently in all three categories.

Ironically, accounts of the origins and results of New York's urban crisis rarely pay attention to key roles played by Jews in this unfolding debacle. Those roles extended from Abe Beame's leadership as mayor, followed by the tenure of a second Jewish mayor, Ed Koch, to the symbolic significance of the lurid "Son of Sam" murders committed by David Berkowitz, who terrorized young New York women in the summer of 1977. Between these two extremes, Jews could be found on all sides of the city's troubles. On the one hand, Jews facilitated the city's decline in several ways: their decision to leave New York for the suburbs, often made by a third or fourth generation; their occupational mobility out of manufacturing and small retail into professions, real estate, and finance; and their abandonment of family-owned tenements and apartment buildings. On the other hand, Jewish-led unions of teachers and city workers helped to stabilize city finances through their pension fund investments when the White House rejected any plan to help New York. In addition, Jewish financiers proved critical--first, in establishing the Municipal Assistance Corporation for the City of New York, and then in creating its successor, the Emergency Financial Control Board. Through these structures, they demanded the dismantling of generous city services in return for a bailout package. As Freeman concludes, "[In] a wild season of capitalist creativity, the banks, state government, and financial community had found a way to retrieve the money investors had lent New York City, in the process stripping the city government, the municipal labor movement, and working-class New Yorkers of much of the power they had accumulated over the previous three decades." (25) This shift in clout from Jews aligned with progressive politics to those committed to a city catering to its financial community remains a largely untold story. Just as struggles between Jewish workers and manufacturers in the early years of the twentieth century helped to make progressive reform politics popular in the city, so did these complex battles among Jewish New Yorkers shape its political future as a world capitalist city.

Scholars studying New York Jews during this decade emphasize a different account that juxtaposes decline with other types of political innovation. Jewish historians similarly stress the demise of Jewish ethnic life rooted in urban neighborhoods and the disappearance of middle-class areas in Brooklyn and the Bronx. These social and demographic changes accompanied a rise of illiberalism and anti-black attitudes among Jews in such middle-class enclaves as Forest Hills and the mixed Italian and Jewish neighborhood of Canarsie. (26) Scholars note the impact of decisions by New York Jews in the postwar decades to move to the suburbs, out to New Jersey, Westchester, and Long Island, as well as to such booming cities as Miami and Los Angeles. They also point to a new militancy among Orthodox Jews, which was evident in the emergence of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), and in such provocative tactics as the disruption of concerts, adopted by activists in the Soviet Jewry movement. (27) Other scholars observed innovation and experimentation that did not echo the grand narrative of urban decline. Some emphasized the emergence of an urban-situated Jewish feminist movement in the early part of the decade that dramatically changed American Judaism. (28) Influential progressive religious innovation also flourished in the city in these years and fit awkwardly with a narrative of declension and illiberalism.

Bringing Jewish history into the fabric of New York City history has involved studying not only immigrant life, but also institutional entanglements of ethnicity across generations. (29) I have also connected the history of New York Jews to the wider story of American Jews. These nested contexts have required that I make claims for the ongoing importance of Jewish life in New York. As a historian, I try not to pine for lost worlds, nor to promote one generation over another. Growing up, I experienced New York as a fast-paced, tough, edgy city. (That, it's worth recalling, has been its reputation since colonial times.) I was proud of my street smarts. Even as I wrote my dissertation (during a time of serious dislocations in New York) about the struggles of another era, I didn't feel discouraged about my city or about the future of its Jews. People are notoriously imperfect creatures, but, with help, many of us manage to adjust to new circumstances and even to struggle forward a little. That has also been the story of New York's Jewish immigrants, of their children, and even, for all the advantages bestowed on them, of their grandchildren and great grandchildren, wherever they live.

(1.) I owe an enormous debt to MacDonald Moore for this essay's conceptualization and prose, just as I did with At Home in America.

(2.) Oxford published Jackson's own first book, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 as part of its series in 1972.

(3.) Email communication to author, July 18, 2015.

(4.) Aryeh Goren also read and critiqued the book manuscript for the press.

(5.) Relevant, for example, was Howard P. Chudacoff's "A New Look at Ethnic Neighborhoods: Residential Dispersion and the Concept of Visibility in a Medium-Sized City," Journal of American History 60:1 (June 1974): 76-93 as well as my fellow graduate student's first book, Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

(6.) Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928) correlates movement to areas of second settlement with assimilation.

(7.) See Sam Bass Warner, Jr. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 18J0-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961).

(8.) Ronald T. Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians of New York City, 1929-1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

(9.) Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 608-638.

(10.) Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1956).

(11.) See quotes on p. 10 of At Home in America (and footnote 14, p. 2.48, which offers several versions of declension by male generation).

(12.) The classic influential account is Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

(13.) Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York Jews 1870-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); Arthur A. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment 1908-1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

(14.) Jeffrey Gurock wrote an illuminating case study of a single neighborhood, Harlem, which bridges the immigrant generation and the second generation. See Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem was Jewish, 1870-1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

(15.) Founded in 1965 as the Immigration History Group, the organization became the Immigration History Society in 1972, and then the Immigration and Ethnic History Society in 1998. See http://www.iehs.org/, accessed August 20, 2015.

(16.) Population of the City of New York 1890-1930, ed., Walter Laidlaw (New York: Cities Census Committee, 1932).

(17.) The Oral History Association was founded in 1966. See http://www.oralhistory. org/about/, accessed August 19, 2015.

(18.) See http://library.columbia.edu/locations/ccob.html, accessed August 19, 2015.

(19.) For more on my "local knowledge," see Deborah Dash Moore, "Sidewalk Histories," in Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping the Nation's Immigration Story, ed. Alan M. Kraut and David A. Gerber (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 32-45.

(20.) In addition to conducting interviews, the AJCommittee research team also collected various political materials--flyers, posters, and buttons. I recall one button that said simply, "NIXON" in Yiddish, a clear message targeting a Jewish constituency that could read Hebrew letters.

(21.) Beth Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), and Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950-1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001).

(22.) Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York's Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

(23.) City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York includes Howard B. Rock, Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654-1865; Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1925; and Jeffrey S. Gurock, Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920-2010. New York University Press published all three volumes in New York in 2012.

(24.) I have drawn from Freeman's excellent chapter on the fiscal crisis, 256-290, Joshua B. Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000), quotes from p. 264.

(25.) Ibid., 287.

(26.) Lederhendler's New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity describes the 1960s rather than the 1970s, but much of what he writes about the earlier period anticipates the 1970s. See also Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). Jeffrey Gurock offers a more complex interpretation in his recent volume, calling his chapter six "Amid Decline and Revival." See Jeffrey S. Gurock, Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City, 1920-2010 (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

(27.) On the Jewish Defense League, see Janet L. Dolgin, Jewish Identity and the JDL (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); on the Soviet Jewry movement see Gal Beckerman, When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

(28.) On Jewish feminism, see Sylvia Barack Fishman, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (New York: Free Press, 1993); and Women Remaking American Judaism, ed. Riv-Ellen Prell, with a foreword by David Weinberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007).

(29.) Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan also pursued this approach in Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963).