The (com)Promised Land: Racial Integration and Liberal Paradoxes in the Weequahic Section of Newark

• In Event: Rethinking Changing Urban Neighborhoods: Segregation, Migration, & Activism

Abstract

The Weequahic Section of Newark was the storied Jewish neighborhood commemorated in the fiction of Philip Roth. From the mid-1920s to early 1960s, Newark Jews weaved Judaism and mainstream American norms into the social fabric of their neighborhood. In the early 1950s, as pioneering African American families with their middle-class aspirations moved into Weequahic, regional Jewish leaders and Weequahic Jews responded to the prospect of integration in ways that mirrored the complexities of the broader debates around Jewish commitments to the Civil Rights Movement. Over the course of the next decade, Newark’s Jewish leadership worked to preserve the integrity of the Jewish community in Weequahic. Some did so while actively building community with African Americans. Others sought a more insular Jewish community within Weequahic. Still, others absconded to racially exclusive suburbs. This talk will chronicle this period of ethnoracial transition in th

Author

• John Wesley Johnson, Saint Peter's University