September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST Fred Allen quotes Kenneth Jackson, a leading historian of American cities, who observed of his trip to Croatia, “There they all look alike and they’re killing each other. Here, we’re all different and we live in peace.” As Jackson would be quick to point out, there is a difference between peace and integration, and it’s worth remembering that today’s ethnic communities—be they Dominican, West African, Chinese, or Mexican—are no more self-segregated and self-contained than Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods in mid-twentieth-century New York. In my book White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics, I explain that in 1930 roughly three-quarters of all Jews in New York City lived in neighborhoods with populations that were at least 40 percent Jewish. Availing themselves of a massive boom in the construction of apartment buildings and two-family houses, particularly in the outer boroughs (Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens), Jews followed the new subway lines to neighborhoods that were actually more ethnically segregated than the places of first settlement commonly portrayed in immigrant literature and film. This trend toward residential segregation along ethnic lines yielded a sharp rise in the general Jewish index of dissimilarity—measuring Jews against the residual population—from 0.38 in 1920 to 0.58 in 1930. Residential patterns held relatively steady in the Depression years, with the Jewish dissimilarity index dropping to 0.56 in 1940, a relative decline of only 3 percent. Twenty years later, in 1960, the index stood at 0.48, representing a larger (14 percent) though not drastic decrease in Jewish residential concentration. In other words, Jewish residential concentration showed remarkable staying power, even as popular and scholarly writers were announcing the end of ethnicity. Like their Jewish neighbors, New York’s Italians and Irish continued to segregate themselves residentially throughout the first decades of the postwar period. Data from the 1960 census indicate that the general citywide dissimilarity index for the Irish was 0.37, and for Italians it was 0.39. Within these insular communities, patterns of work and education worked to further segregate different immigrants from one another, with most Jewish children attending public schools and many Catholic kids attending parish or diocesan schools, and with Jews gravitating to the retail and wholesale sectors, and Irish and Italian Catholics entering blue-collar fields. Just as European immigrant communities in from the 1840s through the 1960s coexisted peacefully but separately, today’s newcomers have carved out entire sections of American cities as distinct ethnic enclaves. Paradoxically, America’s success at accommodating diversity might owe to the willingness of successive generations of urbanites to embrace the “salad bowl” model of pluralism, in which the constituent parts of the recipe retain their distinctive characteristics, rather than the “melting pot” model, which enforces a homogeneous (albeit collaborative) scheme on newcomers. Impressionistically, it seems that countries like France, which expect immigrants to embrace a single national identity, have the hardest time forging national unity. For what it’s worth, the melting-pot and pluralism models were developed by two Jewish immigrants—Israel Zangwill and Horace Kallen—in the early twentieth century. One hundred years later, we’re still having the same discussion.
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