“Oppressed Jewish Neighborhoods”: the JDL’s Early Responses to Neighborhood Integration
Thu, December 19, 3:30 to 5:00pm EST (3:30 to 5:00pm EST), Virtual Zoom Room 06Abstract
This paper will examine the first years of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in Brooklyn and Queens, situating the its activities within the broader modern Orthodox debates on demographic changes and Great Society programs in 1960s New York. The JDL and its founder, Meir Kahane, are now notorious for their militant activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry and for Kahane’s subsequent violent career in Israel, where he found a reliable base preaching a vengeful and messianic Zionism and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Yet the group’s underexamined activities between 1968 and 1972 offer a window into the most militant and anti-Black Jewish responses to urban integration. By promising their members a reinvigorated Jewish masculinity and fighting for a fair share of the city’s anti-poverty funds, the JDL attempted—and ultimately failed—to foment violent mass Jewish reaction in neighborhoods with growing Black and Puerto Rican populations, in the model of other white neighborhood-based resistance. Before groups like the Jewish Federation, AJC, and Agudath Israel began their campaigns focusing on Jewish urban poverty, the JDL led a campaign arguing that the Jewish poor were not receiving their “fair share” of New York City’s anti-poverty programs. It worked with small or short-lived groups like the Association of Jewish Anti-Poverty Workers or the Council of Oppressed Jewish Neighborhoods. While Orthodox communities condemned Kahane and the JDL, the few years that the JDL claimed to speak for the forgotten working-class urban Jew shaped Orthodox neighborhood activists’ rhetoric and their analysis of neighborhood integration and Jewish poverty.