Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit
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Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit
333eBook
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Overview
Complex and subtle, Metropolitan Jews pushes urban scholarship beyond the tenacious black/white, urban/suburban dichotomy. It demands a more nuanced understanding of the process and politics of suburbanization and will reframe how we think about the American urban experiment and modern Jewish history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226247977 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Series: | Historical Studies of Urban America |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 333 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Metropolitan Jews
Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit
By Lila Corwin Berman
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-24797-7
CHAPTER 1
Locating and Relocating the Jewish Neighborhoods of Detroit
Elaine (née Zeidman) and Eugene Driker's backyard in the summer of 2012 provided one point of entry into Jewish Detroit. In the far corner of the well-manicured yard, nestled between the boughs of a stand of pines, a street sign announced the intersection of Dexter Avenue and Davison Street. A ten-minute drive south of the Drikers' Palmer Woods house, the Dexter-Davison intersection in 2012 was home to two gas stations, a liquor store, an empty lot, and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. On a summer morning, a few cars might roll through the intersection and a handful of pedestrians might make their way across the street. The sign staked in the Drikers' backyard, however, pointed toward a different intersection of space and time.
The Drikers, born in Detroit in the late 1930s, grew up near the intersection of Dexter and Davison, an area that Jews, for a time, recognized as the Jewish neighborhood of Detroit. The corner of their youth was the central axis of Jewish life in Detroit, where Jews came to shop at the Dexter-Davison Market and to pause in their errands for conversation and a chance to catch up with one another. Similar to many Detroit Jews in their generation, Eugene and Elaine attended Wayne State, the public university about five miles southeast of the Dexter-Davison intersection and closer to the heart of downtown. In 1959, immediately after Elaine graduated, they married. Eugene finished law school at Wayne State, and the newlyweds set up home in a flat, the second story of a two-story home, close to their childhood homes.
After a short sojourn in Washington, DC, where their daughter was born, the Drikers returned to Detroit. By this time, the early 1960s, the map of the city had changed. Instead of settling near the neighborhood where they had grown up, they moved to another second-story flat on the edge of the Bagley neighborhood that had become a Jewish area after World War II. Bagley, about three miles northwest of the intersection of Dexter and Davison and less than two miles south of Detroit's city limits, was already losing its Jewish residents to the suburbs by the 1960s. After renting for a few years, the Drikers bought their first home in 1965 in Green Acres, a mile north of Bagley, just about as far north as one could go without leaving the city. They lived there for ten years. Many of their neighbors, such as Carl Levin (elected to the United States Senate in 1979), were Jewish, and their two children attended Pasteur Elementary School, the neighborhood public school. In 1975, Eugene and Elaine moved from Green Acres to Palmer Woods, an elegant neighborhood, with curved streets and grand homes, located close to Detroit's northern edge. They would never characterize their neighborhood as a Jewish one, though some Jews, particularly wealthy ones, had lived in it for many decades and some continued to do so.
None of the neighborhoods in which the Drikers lived remained Jewish or white. By the 1980s, each of these neighborhoods, much like the city of Detroit itself, housed a majority of black residents. Most Jewish Detroiters, similar to other whites in the city, left Detroit sometime between World War II and the early 1970s, after having lived in at least one, but often more than one, of these neighborhoods. This could be the end of the story of Jewish life in Detroit: Jews left it. The Drikers' decision to stay in the city was the exception.
Yet what was not exceptional—what was in fact quite typical—about the Drikers' story was the significance they credited to the city and its Jewish neighborhoods in orienting their political, cultural, and spiritual actions. Indeed, for the tens of thousands of Jews who journeyed away from Detroit after World War II, the city remained a place of engagement, and a space from which a new consciousness about what it meant to be a Jew in the United States emerged.
For the Jews of Detroit, the meaning of the city was interwoven with their experiences of living in, leaving, and imagining the Jewish neighborhood. A city street sign posted in the corner of a bucolic backyard made it difficult to know, indeed, where Detroit began and where it ended. One could read the sign as an epitaph, pointing to a time and place that no longer existed. But the sign itself offered a way to position oneself in time and place with respect to the city. Postwar Jews again and again sought to reorient themselves in the city, arriving at new markers to construct their relationship to the topographical and imagined space of Detroit and Jewish Detroit.
Even as Jews lived on the streets of Detroit, occupied its homes and apartments, and shopped in its stores, they understood their lives in the city through ideas about what it meant to be a Jew and an American, living in a city at a particular moment in time. The space of Detroit and the idea of Detroit were inseparable since both were formed in the nexus of the same historical, political, economic, and cultural forces. Though my intention in this chapter is to orient the reader to Detroit, the urban policies that shaped it, and the Jewish neighborhoods that helped create its contours, my argument is that for Jews living in Detroit—and I believe other American cities—after World War II, the city's map shifted many times over in its representation of ideas about space. The map of postwar Detroit and its Jewish spaces reveals historical transformations, multiple understandings of single blocks, intersections, and buildings, divergences among memories, experiences, and desires set in space, and a variety of power relationships mediated by urban policies, economic structures, and collective and individual attitudes. Maps must be specific about time and place, even as they try to capture something general about space and its uses.
On the Idea of the Neighborhood and Detroit's First Jewish Neighborhood
Early twentieth-century sociologists understood the neighborhood as a crucial building block of urban identity. By studying the urban neighborhood, they believed they could better understand the forces of conflict, harmony, and progress that were forming American society. These sociologists, many of whom focused their fieldwork on the city of Chicago, believed that groups and individuals passed through neighborhoods as they rose in socioeconomic status. One could measure an immigrant or ethnic group's level of success by answering a basic geographical question: How far had the group moved from its earliest settlements?
In the sociological imagination of the early to mid-twentieth century, each urban neighborhood constituted its own reality. University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park explained in a 1925 essay, "In the course of time every section and quarter of the city takes on something of the character and qualities of its inhabitants.... The effect of this is to convert what was at first a mere geographical expression into a neighborhood, that is to say, a locality with sentiments, traditions, and a history of its own.... The life of every locality moves on with a certain momentum of its own, more or less independent of the larger circle of life and interests about it." The neighborhoods of a city each represented an ecosystem, replete with its own set of social, cultural, and economic realities. Well into the mid-twentieth century, sociologists maintained that certain neighborhood characteristics endured even as different ethnic groups moved through them. The nature of a neighborhood—the rate of criminality that existed within it or the socioeconomic profile of its inhabitants—was organic to that neighborhood.
Setting aside, for the moment, their neglect of the historical forces, including laws, economic policies, and hierarchical power structures, that shaped neighborhoods, early sociologists were onto something crucial when they drew focus to the unique geographical spaces that constituted cities. A neighborhood may have been a constructed artifice, but it also felt real and vital to its inhabitants who thought of their identities as shaped by the space in which they lived and the answer they gave to the question, where are you from? Indeed, popular discourse on urban neighborhoods, in part molded by the expert culture of sociology, tended to confirm the scholarly perspective that neighborhoods constituted their own realities. The shorthand of a neighborhood name (in Detroit, Twelfth Street or Dexter-Davison, for example) did not simply designate a topographical area; to the residents of a city, it also offered a rich indication of the kind of people who lived there. The linguistic partitioning of neighborhoods was often starker than their generally indistinct topographical boundaries.
The earliest geographic space in Detroit to bear the sobriquet of a Jewish neighborhood was hardly distinct in topographical form or human composition from other immigrant groups' neighborhood turf. Initially, a German settlement, the area became known as the Hastings Street neighborhood, referring to the business thoroughfare that cut through the neighborhood. Slightly to the east of the heart of downtown and close to the Detroit River, the Hastings Street area was part of the east side of the city, where working-class immigrants, predominantly German and Polish, had settled well before the twentieth century. German and Central European Jews found their footing in the neighborhood and by 1880 were in the kinds of professions—proprietors, managers, and white-collar workers—that propelled them into the middle class. The elite among these Jews integrated into the political life of Detroit, serving in elected positions at the city and state level in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interestingly, after 1920, no Jew served on Detroit's elected Common Council until 1962. Clearly an indication of the trajectory of Jewish power in those decades, this fact reveals the outward political power that German Jews attained in the city, and, then, the retrenchment of outward Jewish political power as Eastern European Jews came to predominate and direct their energies toward internal political matters negotiated within neighborhood spaces and as antisemitism rose.
With the settlement of Eastern European Jews in Detroit in the early decades of the twentieth century, German Jews left the Hastings Street neighborhood for areas to the north and west of it, especially several blocks east of Woodward Avenue near Warren and Oakland Avenues. Their reasons for moving were varied. Some viewed the Eastern European Jews as uncouth and not worthy neighbors, but the motivation for better housing stock trumped most other concerns. Documentary journalists from the first decade of the twentieth century reported on the "ghetto" conditions that existed in Hastings Street and identified a few blocks where most Eastern European Jews clustered. Not nearly as densely inhabited as New York City's Lower East Side, Jewish Hastings Street still struck reporters as overcrowded and teeming with foreignness and a "queer Yiddish dialect." The local elementary school, the most populous in the state, had a predominantly Jewish student body, and synagogues and kosher markets lined the streets in this small quadrant of the city. The steady entrance of new Jewish immigrants into the city and the Jewish institutions that had been built over the last half of a century in the neighborhood continued to mark the Hastings Street area as the city's central Jewish neighborhood. Secular, socialist, and religious institutions stood side by side, asserting the internal diversity of the Jewish population, even as reporters saw a uniform mass swelling into the ghetto streets.
The Hastings Street neighborhood was home to a variety of ethnic, religious, and racial groups, and it also represented the densest concentration of Jews in the city. By 1920, roughly 60 percent of the Jews in Detroit lived there, and most lived on blocks with very little ethnic diversity. In other words, Jews inhabited a neighborhood that was diverse, but they resided in relatively homogenous pockets. In their home lives, Jews may have been surrounded primarily by Jews, but in the larger neighborhood Jews were just one of many other populations.
Alongside the internal diversity of the neighborhood and its rather indistinct boundaries from other ethnic neighborhoods, a high level of residential mobility also characterized the Jewish sections of the neighborhood. Many of the non-Jewish groups in the neighborhood tied themselves to its space through their housing investments, purchasing real estate hungrily. The housing stock of Detroit tended toward freestanding homes, whether single family or divided, much more so than apartment buildings, and many immigrants understood real estate ownership as a path toward economic stability in their new country. Surveys from 1900, however, show that Russian Jews had a far lower rate of homeownership than other immigrant populations in Detroit, and they moved more often—generally to bigger homes or nicer streets—than many other immigrants.
Jews' low rates of homeownership did not signify their lack of investment in the neighborhood. To the contrary, they invested in the area through the businesses and institutions they established. Because Jews did not receive a particularly warm welcome into the automobile industry, far more Jews than members of other immigrant groups became proprietors of their own stores and businesses, a fact that tied them to the economies and political struggles of the neighborhoods in which they lived. Of the roughly thirty-five thousand Jews who lived in Detroit in 1920, one-third were business owners or in retail, and proportionally far fewer Jews, when compared to the general population, were identified as laborers, a pattern that would continue into the 1950s and beyond.
Jews maintained their stores in the Hastings Street area much longer than they kept their homes there. Even as they left the neighborhood for more middle-class housing, they remained involved in the neighborhood's economic and political life, through memberships in merchant organizations and involvement in neighborhood political counsels. Also, many Jewish political and social organizations maintained their headquarters in the neighborhood. For example, the United Jewish Charities, established in 1899 and committed to providing relief, education, and support to new Jewish immigrants and their children, kept its stronghold in the Hastings Street area, and, thus, tied Detroit Jews to the neighborhood, whether through philanthropy, voluntarism, or need.
With consistency throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, Jews left the Hastings Street neighborhood to move north to the Warren and Oakland areas and then, increasingly, north and west toward the Twelfth Street neighborhood. Prior to the 1920s, there is no evidence that religious or community leaders castigated Jews for leaving the neighborhood. After all, it suffered from poor infrastructure, was plagued with water and sewer problems, and stood close to factories. The leaders who concerned themselves with planning and serving the Jewish community did not believe that individual Jews should remain there. Rather, most assumed that a steady flow of immigration would naturally ensure an enduring Jewish presence in the neighborhood and would support the Jewish institutions and businesses located there.
Only with the passage of restrictive immigration legislation starting in 1917, did Jewish movement away from the Hastings Street area present a challenge to the Jewish nature of the neighborhood. Without a steady supply of new immigrants to replace the Jews who left the neighborhood, leaders worried about the fate of the area. In 1923, the United Jewish Charities of Detroit charged a social researcher who had earlier served onits staff to study the contours of Detroit's Jewish community. The survey itself, as communal surveys often are, was premised upon a foregone conclusion: Jews were moving away from the Hastings Street neighborhood. The data not only named this trend as an empirical reality, but it also created the justification for reapportioning Jewish agencies' resources to plan for (and thus encourage) more movement. At the same time, the survey bemoaned the material losses that the Jewish community would face if the neighborhood, with its Jewish institutions and buildings, no longer remained a center of Jewish life. How could the community best prepare to avoid serious losses on these investments?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Metropolitan Jews by Lila Corwin Berman. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Jews and the American CityChapter 1. Locating and Relocating the Jewish Neighborhoods of Detroit
Chapter 2. Keeping House in the City: The Local Politics of Urban Space
Chapter 3. Changing Jewish Neighborhoods
Chapter 4. From Neighborhood to City: The Formation of Jewish Metropolitan Urbanism
Chapter 5. The Sacred Suburban Sites of Jewish Metropolitan Urbanism
Chapter 6. Urban Crises and the Privatization of Jewish Urbanism
Chapter 7. Epilogue: Back-to-the-City Jews and the Legacies of Metropolitan Urbanism
Acknowledgments
Archival Collections, Interviews, and Abbreviations
Notes
Index