Why Jewish neighborhoods became black neighborhoods

[Docere]

Certainly there seems to be a pattern during the Second Great Migration (1940-1970) and even the first Great Migration (1910-1930). Jewish neighborhoods were the first to become predominantly Black while white ethnic Catholic neighborhoods usually stayed that way. Examples include Roxbury in Boston, Chicago's West Side, the Glenville area of Cleveland, much of Brooklyn etc.

The general explanation I've heard for this is: Jews moved to the suburbs faster than white Catholics did and Jews who were more liberal on questions of civil rights didn't resist an influx of blacks into their neighborhoods. Synagogues quickly located to the suburbs while Catholic parishes had more of a geographical attachment to them.

One book that addresses this topic is called Urban Exodus, by Gerald Gamm, which looks at the case of Boston.

Obviously this pattern broke down after around 1970 or so (and there were few inner city Jewish neighborhoods left).

[relnahe]

Because the unfortunate views on multiculturalism?

[chris08876]

Plummeting property values and racist elements that caused a lack of funding, and care for those areas. Segregation at work. A general reduction of the school quality and safety in the inner city as well.

[hammersklavier]

Originally Posted by chris08876

Plummeting property values and racist elements that caused a lack of funding, and care for those areas. Segregation at work. A general reduction of the school quality and safety in the inner city as well.

Part of the point is that -- at least on paper -- Jews were much more tolerant of minorities than working-class whites. Don't forget, "Jewish" was considered a separate race on e.g. the 1940 Census.

Jews have historically populated the branch of skilled trades that were largely mercantile. Their heavy involvement in both department stores (Kauffman and Gimbel are just two examples among many) and banking were both offshoots of this, but most would have been self-employed and worked as e.g. haberdashers, bakers, deli owners, import/export dealers, and a variety of other skilled sales and finance trades.

Jews were the nouveau riche of the early 20th century. It was an era when you left the city if you had the money (regardless of race) and the trades the Jews historically populated almost without exception afforded one, at minimum, a solid middle-class lifestyle.

[Crawford]

Two main reasons-

1. Jews were more tolerant than other white ethnics, and less likely to resist a black influx

2. Jews were more upwardly mobile than other white ethnics, so were moving out anyways

[Docere]

Originally Posted by hammersklavier

Don't forget, "Jewish" was considered a separate race on e.g. the 1940 Census.

I've never heard that claim before. If that were true, why isn't there Census data on the Jewish population from the 1940 census if they were counted separately?

The census has never counted the Jewish population.

Jews have historically populated the branch of skilled trades that were largely mercantile. Their heavy involvement in both department stores (Kauffman and Gimbel are just two examples among many) and banking were both offshoots of this, but most would have been self-employed and worked as e.g. haberdashers, bakers, deli owners, import/export dealers, and a variety of other skilled sales and finance trades.

In the cities where there was a large garment industry (i.e. New York, also Toronto and Montreal in Canada) there was a significant Jewish working class in the early 20th century in addition to a large number of small business owners. In other places where the Jewish population was smaller and there wasn't a garment industry, they were overwhelmingly small business owners.

Jews were the nouveau riche of the early 20th century. It was an era when you left the city if you had the money (regardless of race) and the trades the Jews historically populated almost without exception afforded one, at minimum, a solid middle-class lifestyle.

There were some affluent Jews in the early 20th century, but as you said above they were mostly working class and lower middle class. The mass shift to the suburbs and into the professions really occurred after 1945.

[ardecila]

Restrictive covenants banned renting or selling property to blacks and Jews alike. Jewish neighborhoods did not include the same restrictive covenants that had kept blacks out of other white neighborhoods (Garfield Park in Chicago comes to mind).

After the Shelley vs Kraemer decision banned such restrictive covenants in 1948, government policy incentivized many white people, including Jews, to move to the suburbs while blacks were largely excluded.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Two main reasons-

1. Jews were more tolerant than other white ethnics, and less likely to resist a black influx

2. Jews were more upwardly mobile than other white ethnics, so were moving out anyways

NYC was a partial exception I believe as Queens served as a semi-suburbia to which many Jews located in the 1940s and 1950s (few Jews lived in Queens pre-1945), so the population decline across the city as a whole wasn't that dramatic, though certainly the Jewish map changed dramatically between say, 1930 and 1960. But the Jewish population in NYC I believe peaked in the late 1950s while the Italian population probably peaked around 1970 or so (due to staying in the neighborhoods longer as well as post-war immigration to outer borough neighborhoods like Bensonhurst).

[Docere]

Is there a particular reason why Jews shifted from the west side to a northward direction when they moved to the suburbs?

[Larry King]

Originally Posted by Docere

NYC was a partial exception I believe as Queens served as a semi-suburbia to which many Jews located in the 1940s and 1950s (few Jews lived in Queens pre-1945), so the population decline across the city as a whole wasn't that dramatic, though certainly the Jewish map changed dramatically between say, 1930 and 1960.

Same in NE philly, thousands of jews left south and north philly including my family for more suburban NE philly

Jewish neighborhoods always turned over quick because jews were always upwardly mobile and cliquey. Jews wanted to live around eachother and basically each generation moved as they improved their lot in life. Also jews have always been liberal and willing to sell to black people.

One last thing (and i hate to say this) many jews of the old generations didnt sink as much $$ into their houses (or also likely they werent as handy around the house as gentiles) so by the time they were ready to sell the house had alot of deferred maintenance. If you look in the oxford circle section of philly this was pretty common.. i know we sold my grandfathers old house to a lower income landlord and it was in below average shape.

[Rusty van Reddick]

Jewish people didn't threaten to murder one another for selling their homes to black people. It's not just about "restrictive covenants" but about the seething hatred white working class non-Jewish people in places like my home town (Hammond, Indiana) had for blacks. Not, mind you, hispanics, but blacks. My older brother told me dad that if he sold our house to a "black family" (which was obviously not the term he used), Jim B, who lived down the street from us and was interestingly my dad's union steward at the Ford assembly plant where he worked and which had a workforce that was easily 50% African American, would "kill you and burn this house down." Many years later, when I was in college and after my dad had died, a "nice black family" moved next door to my mom; the son shoveled her walk for her. That was fine, but when another "nice black family" moved in, FIVE HOUSES on my block went up for sale. In ONE DAY.

What I heard my entire life growing up in this working class white world of racial hatred was that black people "bring down property values." I determined when I was in middle school that it was the white people who brought them down because they undersold their homes in a panic, an observation that caused my dear older brother, who today is a tea partier who has a CC permit and always carries TWO handguns on his person to protect himself from the "you know whats" (his term), to call me a "nigger lover," a term I heard at least once a week until I left for college.

Jewish people don't have these sorts of families or neighbours.

[Larry King]

Originally Posted by Rusty van Reddick

Jewish people didn't threaten to murder one another for selling their homes to black people. It's not just about "restrictive covenants" but about the seething hatred white working class non-Jewish people in places like my home town (Hammond, Indiana) had for blacks. Not, mind you, hispanics, but blacks. My older brother told me dad that if he sold our house to a "black family" (which was obviously not the term he used), Jim B, who lived down the street from us and was interestingly my dad's union steward at the Ford assembly plant where he worked and which had a workforce that was easily 50% African American, would "kill you and burn this house down." Many years later, when I was in college and after my dad had died, a "nice black family" moved next door to my mom; the son shoveled her walk for her. That was fine, but when another "nice black family" moved in, FIVE HOUSES on my block went up for sale. In ONE DAY.

What I heard my entire life growing up in this working class white world of racial hatred was that black people "bring down property values." I determined when I was in middle school that it was the white people who brought them down because they undersold their homes in a panic, an observation that caused my dear older brother, who today is a tea partier who has a CC permit and always carries TWO handguns on his person to protect himself from the "you know whats" (his term), to call me a "nigger lover," a term I heard at least once a week until I left for college.

Jewish people don't have these sorts of families or neighbours.

...

[Docere]

He's talking about northwest Indiana. Calgary doesn't have a large Black population. Toronto does but it is overwhelmingly comprised of immigrants from the Caribbean and their descendants, who started arriving in big numbers in the 1970s.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Docere

NYC was a partial exception I believe as Queens served as a semi-suburbia to which many Jews located in the 1940s and 1950s (few Jews lived in Queens pre-1945), so the population decline across the city as a whole wasn't that dramatic, though certainly the Jewish map changed dramatically between say, 1930 and 1960. But the Jewish population in NYC I believe peaked in the late 1950s while the Italian population probably peaked around 1970 or so (due to staying in the neighborhoods longer as well as post-war immigration to outer borough neighborhoods like Bensonhurst).

And the Jewish population in NYC is now growing quickly again, and is reestablishing a presence in many neighborhoods.

But this is a totally different population. The Jewish population we're talking about is the secular, highly educated and affluent population that left inner cities between the 1950's and 1970's. This new population is Orthodox and Hasidic and reestablishing a presence in neighborhoods that hadn't seen Jews in 40 years. They're expanding due to demographic issues (tons of babies) and moving to places that transitioned from secular Jewish to black in past decades (places like Northern Crown Heights, Bed Stuy, and Flatlands).

They're also reestablishing a population in white ethnic neighborhoods. Bensonhurst was 50/50 Jewish/Italian in the 1960's, but the upwardly mobile Jews mostly left for the suburbs, leaving Bensonhurst as the stereotypical Brooklyn Italian enclave in the 1970's onwards. But now that the Italian population is slowly declining, either passing on or moving to the suburbs, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews have largely taken over the northern reaches of Bensonhurst (which is adjacent to overcrowded, expensive, all-Jewish Borough Park)

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Rusty van Reddick

Jewish people didn't threaten to murder one another for selling their homes to black people. It's not just about "restrictive covenants" but about the seething hatred white working class non-Jewish people in places like my home town (Hammond, Indiana) had for blacks. Not, mind you, hispanics, but blacks.

It's a little more complex, though.

Yes, there was lots of racism. But the white ethnics who resisted had all their net worth invested in their homes. They knew a black influx would destroy their property values (and were often right). They didn't have the upward mobility of the Jewish population. And they had often put large sums of money in upgrading their homes, unlike the Jewish population. And Italians and other ethnics are a quite tight-knit population that tend to have family members buy on the same block, and try to stay rooted for generations. The blockbusting of the era destroyed these traditions.

So there were very logical reasons to resist the influx, even if not motivated by racism. Those who resisted the black population turned out to be correct in most of their predictions, most of the time. The South Suburbs of Chicago and adjacent parts of NW Indiana did have their property values destroyed, did develop crap schools, did lose a tremendous amount of businesses, retail and amenities. The primary reason is race.

Places like Calgary, or American places like Portland, or El Paso, or Boise, or Duluth, didn't have these issues. It isn't because these areas are "less racist", it's because they never had a significant black population.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Crawford

And the Jewish population in NYC is now growing quickly again, and is reestablishing a presence in many neighborhoods.

But this is a totally different population. The Jewish population we're talking about is the secular, highly educated and affluent population that left inner cities between the 1950's and 1970's. This new population is Orthodox and Hasidic and reestablishing a presence in neighborhoods that hadn't seen Jews in 40 years. They're expanding due to demographic issues (tons of babies) and moving to places that transitioned from secular Jewish to black in past decades (places like Northern Crown Heights, Bed Stuy, and Flatlands).

They're also reestablishing a population in white ethnic neighborhoods. Bensonhurst was 50/50 Jewish/Italian in the 1960's, but the upwardly mobile Jews mostly left for the suburbs, leaving Bensonhurst as the stereotypical Brooklyn Italian enclave in the 1970's onwards. But now that the Italian population is slowly declining, either passing on or moving to the suburbs, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews have largely taken over the northern reaches of Bensonhurst (which is adjacent to overcrowded, expensive, all-Jewish Borough Park)

Yup, a very different Jewish population. The stereotypical "New York liberal Jew" is now a minority. The Jewish population peaked at about 2 million in the 1950s, then dropped to 972,000 half a century later. It's now 1.1 million and the population growth was almost entirely among the Orthodox in Brooklyn; the other boroughs and the suburbs it stayed about the same.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...-brooklyn.html

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Docere

Yup, a very different Jewish population. The stereotypical "New York liberal Jew" is now a minority. The Jewish population peaked at about 2 million in the 1950s, then dropped to 972,000 half a century later. It's now 1.1 million and the population was almost entirely among the Orthodox in Brooklyn; the other boroughs and the suburbs it stayed about the same.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...-brooklyn.html

Correct. The stereotype of the New York Jew as the "Jerry Seinfeld/Woody Allen" secular Manhattan Jew is long-outdated. The Jewish population in NYC is mostly leaning conservative, not as educated, very religious, traditional and with large families. Some communities are rich (such as the Syrian Jews of Gravesend) others are poor (such as the Satmar of North Brooklyn).

I predict the politics in NYC will make a rightward change over the next 50 years. NYC will grow somewhat more conservative, as the Hasidic/Orthodox population grows. They have very different interests than the secular population and vote as a unified block.

The NYC-area population is a little different than in other metros. It just leans more religious, even in the suburbs, among the richer secular populations. Plenty of people in Scarsdale and Great Neck are wearing the kippah and walking to synagogue. I grew up in the most Jewish town in Michigan (West Bloomfield) and most Jews were Reform. and many would eat pork and were just culturally Jewish. When I went to college in the Northeast, the secular suburban Jews of the NYC area were almost all raised Conservative, and even some were Modern Orthodox (unkown in Michigan). Reform Judaism isn't big in the NYC area. Even liberal Jews tend to be raised Conservative (the faith, not the politics). It would be a mini-scandal if they had bacon or partied on the sabbath, and these were the most liberal Jews.

[NorthernDancer]

Originally Posted by Larry King

That's interesting and I had no idea Calgary even had black people

He explicitly said Hammond, Indiana in his post. And I hope you're trolling when you say you had no idea a city of more than 1 million people had black people. Because that's one of the most idiotic statements I've ever heard.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Crawford

They're also reestablishing a population in white ethnic neighborhoods. Bensonhurst was 50/50 Jewish/Italian in the 1960's, but the upwardly mobile Jews mostly left for the suburbs, leaving Bensonhurst as the stereotypical Brooklyn Italian enclave in the 1970's onwards. But now that the Italian population is slowly declining, either passing on or moving to the suburbs, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews have largely taken over the northern reaches of Bensonhurst (which is adjacent to overcrowded, expensive, all-Jewish Borough Park)

Yeah, it's interesting that Bensonhurst is thought of as the classic Italian American neighborhood but it was more Jewish than Italian until about 1960. Its Italian character is really from the post-war immigration not from the 3rd and 4th generation descendants of the big Ellis Island wave (In contrast, Little Italy in Manhattan declined after about 1920 so it didn't attract new immigrants and had dwindled to just a few hangers on by the 1960s and 1970s).

Definitely both the Jewish and Italian populations of the NYC area are less "melted" than elsewhere in the US.

[brian_b]

Originally Posted by Crawford

It's a little more complex, though.

Yes, there was lots of racism. But the white ethnics who resisted had all their net worth invested in their homes. They knew a black influx would destroy their property values (and were often right). They didn't have the upward mobility of the Jewish population. And they had often put large sums of money in upgrading their homes, unlike the Jewish population.

Wow, that's just ridiculous.

The black family that bought a house in a white neighborhood was wealthy enough to afford to pay market value for the house and wealthy enough to maintain the house and there was no reason to think any differently.

The problem was the greedy white guy that followed right behind the black family and played off everyone's bigotry until they were so filled with fear that they would sell their houses to him at a steep discount, setting off a chain reaction that destroyed the neighborhood but made him very wealthy.