Rethinking Changing Urban Neighborhoods: Segregation, Migration, & Activism

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Session Sponsor: CJH Working Group on "Shared and Contested Spaces and Identities: American Jews and African Americans."

Abstract

Thechanging neighborhoods of American cities during the 1950s and 1960s are oftenexamined through the lens of white flight, with Jews as one example of whiteswho fled inner cities. This history has tended to pinpoint white resistance tothe civil rights movement as a key instigator of white migration. While notinaccurate, this framing sidelines earlier factors in white flight and doesn’taccount for the diversity of Jewish responses. This panel complicates ourunderstanding of urban change by looking at the changing landscape of three keyurban centers in the United States: Atlanta, Newark, and greater New York City. The panelbegins with a paper by Marni Davis that focuses on the prehistory of whiteflight in Atlanta during the 1920s-1930s. Davis examines debates withinAtlanta’s first Jewish congregation as well as the experience of antisemitismin the South. The paper is followed by John Wesley Johnson Jr.’s analysis ofthe Weequahic neighborhood of Newark in the 1950s-1960s. Like Davis, Johnsoncomplicates the story of white flight by examining the tensions withWeequahic’s Jewish community during the period of ethno-racial transition.Importantly, Johnson situates these conflicts within the crisis of Jewishliberalism. In the third and final paper, Hadas Binyamini investigates first years of the Jewish Defense League(JDL) in Brooklyn and Queens, situating its activities within the broadermodern Orthodox debates on demographic changes. She argues that the JDL helped shape Orthodoxneighborhood activists’ rhetoric and the analysis of neighborhood integrationand Jewish poverty. 

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in the Americas

Chair

• Hilit Surowitz-Israel, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual Presentations

• “A Shifting of the Center of Gravity of the Jewish Community”: Jewish Responses to Residential Racial Segregation in Atlanta in the Interwar Period - Marni Davis, Georgia State University

• The (com)Promised Land: Racial Integration and Liberal Paradoxes in the Weequahic Section of Newark - John Wesley Johnson, Saint Peter's University

• “Oppressed Jewish Neighborhoods”: the JDL’s Early Responses to Neighborhood Integration - Hadas Binyamini, New York University

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 06