The End of the Old Ethnic City

The author looks at the fabric of midcentury urban America—what held it together and what tore it apart.

In 1954 a rabbi at the Forest Hills Jewish Center in Queens told his congregation on the Rosh Hashanah holiday that “the refusal to be comforted has been the secret passion of our people’s history. . . . We created special institutions to keep us maladjusted, to remind us of our troubles, to perpetuate our grief.” He added that “Judaism does not only teach us to accept, but also to resist. When Abraham was told by God that He is about to destroy Sodom, he did not bow his head in humble submission. He protested. He challenged God to justify His actions.”

Writing of his years as a student at St. Philip Neri Elementary School in the 1950s, the novelist Michael Pearson recalled learning the same biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. A poor liar, Pearson had failed to convince Mother Concepta, his first-grade teacher, that he was not the chief culprit in a pencil fight that had erupted while she was out of the room. Making an example of Pearson, Mother Concepta reminded the class that “Lot’s wife turned around. She looked back. She disobeyed, boys and girls. And God turned her into a pillar of salt. Remember Lot’s wife, children. Remember her.”

In postwar New York, Catholics and Jews often encountered the same biblical passages but extracted opposite lessons from them. That is one of the central findings of my new book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (North Carolina, 296 pages, $24.95).

When I set out several years ago to study New York’s once-vibrant white ethnic communities, I expected to tell of their postwar decline, much in the way the historian Eric Goldman once concluded that “by 1949 . . . the typical American . . . was a third-generation immigrant. Rising to the middle class left [him or her] only the more anxious to achieve the further respectability of unhyphenated Americanism.”

I wanted to know more about the causes of this transformation, but after countless hours combing through a variety of sources—synagogue and church sermons, religious and public school materials, oral histories, census records, memoirs, literary and dramatic works, organizational and personal manuscript collections, contemporary press reports, and polls and surveys—I found, to my surprise, that ethnicity was still a very powerful force in early Cold War–era cities.

Although popular histories of white ethnic groups tend to assume that urban Italians, Irish, and Jews practically all moved to suburban neighborhoods after 1940 and abandoned every trace of their distinctive ethno-religious identities, this was far from true. Between the 1940s and the late 1960s New York City’s three largest white ethnic groups—Jews, Italian Catholics, and Irish Catholics—numbered as many as 4.3 million people, roughly two thirds of New York’s white population and more than half of its total population.

Moreover, most Jews, Irish, and Italians in postwar New York continued to live in neighborhoods that were often just as ethnically segregated, statistically speaking, as the storied Lower East Side Jewish ghetto of the early 1900s. Demographers measure residential segregation on a scale of zero to 100, with zero representing no segregation and 100 representing total segregation. In 1920 the citywide index of dissimilarity for Jews was 38 percent; in 1960 it was 48 percent. In other words, Jews were more segregated after World War II than in the peak years of immigration.

Even when they shared the same city streets, their patterns of schooling and social life kept them apart. In New York, for instance, in any given year upwards of two thirds of all Catholic children from kindergarten through eighth grade were enrolled in parish schools; more than 95 percent of Jewish children attended public schools. This meant that most Jewish and Catholic youngsters simply never met or knew each other in the course of their formative education.

Social segregation helped sustain powerful differences in ideology and outlook. With their cohesive middle-class identity, and having been through the democratization of Jewish political life both in Eastern Europe and in the immigrant ghetto, New York Jews by the 1950s had refashioned their popular theology and history to place disputativeness and secular liberalism at the center of their ethnic identity. Many Jews came to believe that dissent and political agitation were timeless virtues of Judaism, and that it was not only proper but also distinctively Jewish to challenge authority in the broad pursuit of liberal political goals.

In so reinventing their heritage, they entered the Cold War era in possession of values that frequently placed them at odds with many of their Irish and Italian Catholic neighbors, who tended to share a general commitment to order, deference to authority, and allegiance to organic community. At home and in parish schools, generations of Catholic New Yorkers internalized a respect for public and religious authority and a general skepticism of radical dissent, attitudes that were at once the product of their religious subculture and a reflection of their predominantly homogeneous working-class environment. The Catholic catechism, drilled through daily repetition into the memory of every parochial schoolboy and schoolgirl in New York, affirmed that “citizens should love their country, respect those who are invested with social authority, pray for them, obey the laws, and conscientiously discharge their political obligations and exercise their political rights.”

Ultimately, differences in ideology and outlook ruptured the New Deal coalition of urban Jew, Catholic, and African-American. As postwar liberalism moved away from bread-and-butter issues and became increasingly concerned with individual rights, many Catholics, raised on a more communitarian ethic, became uncomfortable with the party of Franklin Roosevelt. As early as 1944, Roosevelt won less than half of New York’s Irish vote and only 41 percent of its Italian vote, while garnering an overwhelming 87 percent of the Jewish vote. According to one poll, John F. Kennedy lost the city’s Irish vote to Richard Nixon. By the early 1970s, half of all Jews considered themselves liberals and another 27 percent moderates, while just 13 percent of Catholics identified themselves as liberals. In effect, a process that had begun around the time of World War II came full circle by the close of the Vietnam War.

By the late 1960s two important developments began to reconfigure the sharply bifurcated world of “white ethnic New York.” First, schisms emerged in the city’s Irish and Italian communities over civil rights, student activism, and religious worship. Amid the general revolt against authority in America during the late 1960s, many Italian and Irish New Yorkers, spurred on by Vatican II, began to question religious and civic authorities. This signaled an end to the insular and cohesive Catholic culture of the early Cold War period.

This process was hastened as many third-generation Catholics went to college and into middle-class professions, bringing an end to the Italian and Irish communities’ overwhelmingly homogeneous working-class composition. Also, the mass migration of large numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe changed the political demography of New York Jewry, delivering a sizable minority of ultra-traditional, ideologically conservative Jews to the city’s outer boroughs right when, in the 1970s, large numbers of city Jews were repairing to the suburbs and the Sunbelt.

In Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel American Pastoral, Seymour “Swede” Levov escapes the Jewish-American ghetto of Newark for life in the unhyphenated suburbs. A second-generation Jew, Levov “could have married any [Jewish] beauty he wanted,” according to his curmudgeonly younger brother. “Instead he marries the bee-yoo-ti-full Miss Dwyer. You should have seen them. Knockout couple. The two of them all smiles on their outward trip into the USA. She’s post-Catholic, he’s post-Jewish, together they’re going out there to Old Rimrock to raise little post-toasties.”

Philip Roth’s characters grew up just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, but try as he may, Seymour Levov could never really escape being Jewish. And his wife, Mary Dawn Dwyer, could never really escape being Irish Catholic.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown).