Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism

by Jonathan Rieder

Overview

What accounts for the precarious state of liberalism in the mid 1980s? Why was the Republican Party able to steal away so many ethnic Democrats of modest means in recent presidential elections? Jonathan Rieder explores these questions in his powerful study of the Jews and Italians of Canarsie, a middle-income community that was once the scene of a wild insurgency against racial busing. Proud bootstrappers, the children of immigrants, Canarsians may speak with piquant New York accents, but their story has a more universal appeal. Canarsie is Middle America, Brooklyn-style.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674042742
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/15/1987
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	306
File size:	589 KB

About the Author

Jonathan Rieder is Professor of Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Contents
introduction Danger and Dispossession
part one History
1 The Fenced Land
2 Ethnic Traditions
part two Territorial, Social, and Cultural Threats
3 Vulnerable Places
4 The Lost People
5 The Reverence Is Gone
part three Reactions to Threat
6 Striking Back
7 Canarsie Schools for Canarsie Children
8 The Trials of Liberalism
Notes
Index
Photographs by Laurence Levin

Editorial Reviews

A remarkably compelling portrait of the ways of middle America, drawn with compassion, grace, and wisdom.

Kai Erikson

Jonathan Rieder’s new book should be required reading, particularly for that endangered tribe of unabashed Jewish liberals, of which I count myself one… Unsettling and powerful.

Reform Judaism - Al Vorspan

No scholarly book of recent memory better conveys the specific sense of outraged betrayal that swept through the urban precincts of the Democratic Party in the mid-1970s than does Jonathan Rieder’s brilliant study Canarsie.

Wilson Quarterly

A sparkling shower of insights… Intellectually exciting.

American Journal of Sociology

The rise of Ronald Reagan and the politics of the 1980s surprised many of the country’s best-known analysts… Jonathan Rieder was in the right places at the right time—the streets and kitchens of Canarsie, Brooklyn—to understand what was actually happening (and going to happen next) in American politics.

Richard Reeves

This is the best ethnography of a white community to appear in a decade, and should be read by every scholar in urban sociology, political sociology, and social movement… Rieder has crafted a finely detailed portrait.

Contemporary Sociology

Yale anthropologist Jonathan Rieder spent two years living not in New Guinea or up the Amazon but in a place that his academic colleagues probably found even more exotic: the lower-middle-class neighborhood adjacent to New York’s Kennedy Airport. There Rieder witnessed close-up the destruction of Roosevelt’s coalition by voter revulsion against crime, welfare, and casual disorder.

Wall Street Journal - David Frum