racism in the united states

Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond

Lila Corwin Berman

By the late 1960s, Detroit’s Temple Beth El was in the final stages of planning its move to the suburbs. Housed since 1922 in a colonnaded neoclassical building on Woodward Avenue, the Reform synagogue had long served as a visible anchor for Jewish life in midtown Detroit. Now, almost a half century after the building had been erected, the congregation leaders were amassing their resources to construct a modernist synagogue in a suburb seventeen miles to the northwest. As of 1965 almost half of all Detroit Jews lived in the suburbs, and the vast majority of Jews who remained in the city occupied a series of middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods that abutted the northwest suburbs. Yet Temple Beth El did not go gentle into the postwar suburbs. In the summer of 1967, mere weeks after the Detroit riots spread through the blocks around the syna- gogue, the rabbi and synagogue president issued a statement describing their congregants as “ambassadors of reconciliation” and depicting the synagogue’s physical location as a “source of strength and stability . . . to our city.” As late as 1969, when relocation to the suburbs had become a near certainty, synagogue leaders assured the congregation that “a new edifice in the suburbs” would not undermine Temple Beth El’s “commit[ment] to the problems of the inner-city.”1

Well before the Detroit riots, and well before Temple Beth El, other synagogues, Jewish institutions, and Jews left the city, Jews had created a new politics of urban invest- ment that was intensified, not diminished, by urban flight and upheaval. Jewish leaders and activists did not equate Jews’ migration from the city with Jewish abandonment of

Lila Corwin Berman is an associate professor of history and the director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University. The author wishes to thank Patricia Becker, Matt Lassiter, Jennifer Mittel- stadt, Deborah Dash Moore, Bryant Simon, and Heather Thompson; the JAH, its reviewers, including Beryl Satter and Kenneth Waltzer, and its careful and patient editors; the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies and the Metropolitan History Workshop, both at the University of Michigan; and the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality.

Readers may contact Berman at [email protected].

1 Sidney Bolkosky, Harmony and Dissonance: Voices of Jewish Identity in Detroit, 1914–1967 (Detroit, 1991), 300. “Beth El to Continue in Present Location, Pastoral Letter Asserts,” Detroit Jewish News, Aug. 11, 1967, p. 5. Archie Katcher to Oscar Zemon, Jan. 3, 1969 (Rabbi Leo M. Franklin Archives, Temple Beth El, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.) The July 1967 Detroit riot left 43 people dead (30 of whom were killed by law enforcement person- nel), more than 2,500 buildings looted or burned, and more than 7,000 people arrested. See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996; Princeton, 2005), 259; and Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor, 1989).

doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas260 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

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the city. Rather, they asserted that one did not have to live in the city to care about it or be an urban activist.

The depth of Jews’ postwar urban investment has been clouded by the striking demo- graphics of Jewish suburbanization and the persuasive scholarship on white flight that correlates the journey away from the city with detachment from the city. Roughly one out of every three Jews in the United States moved to the suburbs in the two decades after World War II. Historians often note that Jews left cities more rapidly than other whites, and some scholars attribute this difference to historical patterns of Jewish mobil- ity and portability that served as survival strategies for Jews in hostile lands. Otherwise, historians tend to view Jewish urban flight as consonant with the trends of white flight more generally. Yet a close analysis of Jews’ political activism from World War II through the 1960s reveals the limitations of the current historical discussion on white flight and demands that historians rethink the correlations they have drawn between space, identity, and politics.2

Temple Beth El, pictured above in a 1963 photograph, remained in the central-city area of Detroit longer than most other synagogues. Designed by Louis Kahn, the building on Woodward Avenue and Gladstone Street was completed in 1922. The new Temple Beth El building, pictured on the facing page in the final stages of construction, opened in 1973 in suburban Bloomfield Hills and was designed by Minoru Yamasaki. Courtesy Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

2 Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915 (New York, 1977); Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago, 1928); Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter; A History (New York, 1989), 321.

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Influenced by a theoretical interest in space (the “spatial turn”), a rich historiography draws attention to the landscape of the suburbs as a fortification against urban problems and as the setting for a new form of anti-urban, white conservatism. In his book about postwar Atlanta, Kevin Kruse asserts that “White flight, in the end, was more than a physical relocation. It was a political revolution.” In similar fashion, Thomas Sugrue and Robert Self explain, “The mass migration of tens of millions of Americans to suburban areas realigned American politics.” Sugrue, Self, Kruse, and other historians have shaped a white-flight scholarship that connects individuals’ decisions to leave cities with the structural realities of racist federal housing policy. As David Freund illuminates in his study of suburban Detroit, “New racial thinking was decisively shaped by the powerful new institutions and private practices that fueled postwar suburban growth while also successfully excluding most black people from its benefits.” White conservative politics, invested in shielding white middle-class life from problems perceived as urban and non- white, may have gestated in cities, but it thrived in suburban sites of urban removal.3

Woven into accounts of the new suburban politics of ex-urbanites is the history of the transformation of European immigrants into white ethnic Americans. As George Lipsitz writes, “The suburbs helped turn European Americans into ‘whites’ who could live near

3 Barney Warf and Santa Arias, eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York, 2009), 1–10. Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005), 6. For a similar discussion of white flight that gives more attention to the variety of suburbanites’ politics, see Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006). Robert O. Self and Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Power of Place: Race, Political Economy, and Identity in the Postwar Metropolis,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, 2002), 28. David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Politics and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, 2007), 8. On black subur- banization, see Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2004).

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each other and intermarry with relatively little difficulty. But this ‘white’ unity rested on residential segregation and on shared access to housing and life chances largely unavail- able to communities of color.” For European immigrants, admission into the suburbs served as a geographic marker of acceptance into a white power structure that defined itself by the distance it maintained from a black, urban underclass.4

As valuable as historians’ spatialization of white-flight politics and identity is, it does not satisfactorily account for the enduring urbanism that accompanied Jewish urban flight. In this article I draw attention to Jews’ collective and public politics as communi- cated through their leaders, institutions, and press in postwar Detroit to illustrate how Jews transformed their politics from local urbanism to remote urbanism. In the immedi- ate postwar years, Jews located their politics in their urban neighborhoods and pursued local, individual, and communal methods to improve their urban existences and to address the perceived challenges of racial integration. In the decades that followed, however, they shifted the focus of their urbanism away from the neighborhood and toward a more geographically remote legislative and policy-oriented form of political activism. Whether as elected officials, lobbyists, or members of a courted voting constitu- ency, Jews gained faith that their voices would be heard even when they spoke from beyond their neighborhood. They came to perceive the problems of urbanism and, espe- cially, urban race relations as much larger than their individual or communal responses to them. So if in the midst of their new efforts to reform urban policy and law, Jews left the city (as they did), moved their synagogues and institutions to the suburbs (as they did), and stopped voting in city elections and referenda (as they did), they could still maintain they were activists for the cause of urban betterment.

Detroit Jews knew they were not alone in reinventing their urbanism in spaces geo- graphically remote from cityscapes. They communicated with Jewish leaders throughout the United States. From west Philadelphia to Newark to Boston to Baltimore to Chica- go’s Hyde Park and Lawndale to Queens to Brooklyn’s Brownsville and Crown Heights to Shaker Heights in Cleveland to Boyle Heights in Los Angeles to Detroit, Jews invested energy initially in maintaining their local urbanism and later in preserving their remote urbanism through legislative as well as policy- and coalition-oriented politics that connected them to urban concerns and urban identities.5

4 George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 47 (Sept. 1995), 374. On whiteness, see also Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 171–99; David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White; The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, 2005), 157–98; and Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, 1996), 209–50.

5 For studies of Jews in other U.S. cities, see Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Cleveland (Cleveland, 1978); Henry Goldschmidt, Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights (New Brunswick, 2006); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York, 1983); William B. Helmreich, The Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and MetroWest (New Brunswick, 1999); Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions (New York, 1992); Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1965 (Philadelphia, 2003); Antero Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Chicago, 2010); Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago, 2002); George J. Sańchez, “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiracial- ism on the Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly, 56 (Sept. 2004), 633–61; Beryl Satter, Family Proper- ties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York, 2009); and David Varady,

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Jews’ local and remote urban politics were rife with contradiction and hypocrisy that white-flight and whiteness scholarship has helped expose. As urban dwellers, Jews often championed the ideals of integration while personally benefiting from a racist housing system that exploited black Americans’ desperation for and exclusion from decent housing and mortgages. And when Jews left cities in the second half of the twentieth century, they materially disinvested in urban life in the same way as countless white Americans. Yet Jews’ migration away from cities must be reconsidered within the frame- work of an ongoing urban Jewish consciousness that did not simply acquiesce to a white, suburban, conservative politics.6

Jews’ urban activism, whether local or remote, tended to follow the shifting terrain of civil rights–era liberalism. In the 1940s leftism and liberalism still found common cause around issues of individual rights and class betterment. Yet with the rise of the Cold War, many Jewish institutions purged their leftist members and participated in a nation- wide assault on the Left. Liberals, strengthened by the diminished Left, placed their faith in the state to protect individual and group rights. Simultaneously, rising strains of black radicalism and white conservatism challenged the efficacy of civil rights liberalism, guiding some Jews toward a neoconservative politics that rejected the idea of state-based group protections in favor of individual rights. Most Jews, however, eschewed white con- servatism and remained committed to a liberal belief in the power of the state to protect individual rights alongside group interests.7

Jews’ liberalism alone does not explain the contours of their postwar politics and iden- tity. The lines dividing leftists, liberals, and, eventually, neoconservatives were often blurry and the wide range of issues related to Israel or the Holocaust disrupted neat political taxonomies.8 Rather, we must also pay close attention to Jews’ urbanism and their shifting relationship to the city to gain a more complete appreciation of postwar politics across the ideological spectrum. Simply put, one’s location in space is not neces- sarily coterminous with one’s politics or identity.

What follows has broad implications for our understanding of postwar cities and poli- tics, but it is not a mere proxy for the history of urban politics. Importantly, my discus- sion of Jews’ relationship with urban space and politics is concerned with how Jews perceived the presence and proximity of African Americans, and it is not intended to illuminate the equally complicated subject of how African Americans thought about their entrance into spaces that Jews claimed as Jewish or white. American Jews’ attach- ment to cities stemmed from their particular investment in maintaining space for Jewish

“Wynnefield: Story of a Changing Neighborhood,” in Philadelphia Jewish Life, 1940–2000, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia, 2003), 101–12.

6 On Jews’ roles, both exploitative and reformist, in urban real estate, see Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood; and Satter, Family Properties. On Jews’ ambivalence about whiteness, see Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, 2006).

7 On the shifting nature of liberalism during the civil rights era and the growing distance between liberal attitudes and activism, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008), 540. On ethnic politics and liberalism, see Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill, 2007). For a groundbreaking study of suburban liberalism, see Lily Geismer, “Don’t Blame Us: Grassroots Liberalism in Massachusetts, 1960–1990” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2010).

8 Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (New York, 2002).

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life to survive and thrive in the United States. Jews, whether they were religious or not religious, generally perceived cities as more hospitable to Jews than other environments. During eras of European enlightenment and liberalization, progressive policies to inte- grate Jews into civic life tended to originate in urban areas and benefit urban Jews most. Furthermore, in the United States, Jewish intellectuals crafted new models for American citizenship grounded in clearly urban perspectives; theories of cultural pluralism and dual civilizations valorized the kinds of public space that cities offered, where diverse groups could interact and still stake out spaces defined by ethnic propinquity.9

The vast majority of Jews in the United States first settled in cities and found relative success in them. Even as Jews moved away from the postwar city, many persisted in the belief that cities offered freedom, security, and a sense of possibility for them and, by extension, all Americans. Jews’ urbanism resided at the heart of postwar Jewish politics, though this urbanism did not manifest itself in a singular political perspective. Jews on the left, Jews on the right, and the large pool of postwar Jews who were somewhere in the liberal center all drew upon visions of enduring urbanism to animate their political ideals.

The Jewish Neighborhoods of Detroit

With notable frequency historians have looked to Detroit for explanations of twentieth- century urban transformations. Its rise and fall as an urban industrial center and its demo- graphic shift from a white city to a black city parallel similar shifts in many other urban locales. The unique texture of Detroit—the role that the automobile industry played in defining the city, its distance from either coast, and the eventual thoroughness of its segrega- tion and deindustrialization—has also attracted historians interested in documenting urban tensions and politics. Yet historians of Jewish urban politics have almost entirely neglected Detroit. In the neighborhoods of Detroit, one finds an unexplored slice of American Jewish life that is connected to postwar experiences of urban Jews throughout the United States and speaks powerfully to the relationship between urban politics and space.10

The approximately 35,000 Jews who lived in Detroit by 1920 experienced the tri- umphs of a city that had grown astronomically over the last half decade. Detroit had become the fourth largest city in the United States and, by 1937, with 71,000 Jews, the sixth largest Jewish city. More than 80 percent of those Jews lived a few miles to the

9 For overviews of Jews’ relationship to urbanism, see Ezra Mendelsohn, ed., People of the City: Jews and the Urban Challenge (New York, 1999); and Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004), 1, 10, 40–104. See also special issues devoted to Jews, geography, and identity in Jewish Social Studies, 11 (Spring–Summer 2005); and Prooftexts, 26 (Winter–Spring 2006). On Jewish theories of national citizenship, see Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley, 2009), 93–118; and Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington, 2011), 63–90.

10 On Detroit, see Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York, 2004); Freund, Colored Property; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis; Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, 1993); Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, 2001); and Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago, 1982). On Detroit’s Jews, see Bolkosky, Harmony and Dissonance; Henry J. Meyer, “The Structure of the Jewish Community in the City of Detroit” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1939); Robert A. Rockaway, The Jews of Detroit: From the Beginning, 1762–1914 (Detroit, 1986); and Kenneth Waltzer, “East European Jewish Detroit in the Early Twentieth Century,” Judaism, 49 (Summer 2000), 291–309.

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north and west of the city center in the Twelfth Street–Linwood–Dexter neighborhood, so called for its major thoroughfares. The neighborhood was populated by middle-class Jews and white ethnic Catholics, with predominantly two-flat (or two-family) homes and a smattering of single-family dwellings.11

Even though as many non-Jews as Jews lived in the neighborhood, Jews perceived the neighborhood as Jewish space and identified its terrain and meaning as firmly located within the Jewish community. The demographics and geography of the neighborhood drove this sense; some blocks housed almost exclusively Jewish families, and Jews knew where other Jews lived. Additionally, the neighborhood’s streetscape reflected Jewish life. Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox synagogues, the Jewish Community Center, a United Hebrew School building, and Jewish bakeries and stores lined the central arteries. Finally, the almost entirely Jewish student body at the local public schools confirmed Jews’ perception that they inhabited a Jewish neighborhood. Because most Catholic chil- dren attended parochial schools, Jews experienced neighborhood elementary schools and high schools as Jewish institutions.12

Jews’ perception of Jewish space, however, was mutable. As in most other cities, Jews in Detroit had first settled in a downtown neighborhood, the Hastings Street neighbor- hood, adjacent to the city center and industry. Jews clustered in a handful of blocks and established Jewish institutions and shops. Over time, many Jews left Hastings Street for better housing stock and public services, gradually settling in the Twelfth Street– Linwood–Dexter neighborhood. A stream of newcomers, however, kept the population of Jews in Hastings Street constant until the 1920s, when a community study found that “with the steady increase of the Negro population and their pressure upon the Jewish districts for housing facilities,” the Jewish population was waning. That trend was exacer- bated by new restrictions on immigration that slowed the influx of new Jews into the neighborhood. According to the authors of the community study, the demise of the Hastings Street neighborhood “created a serious problem for the Jewish community” and its ability to maintain stable institutional life.13 Nonetheless, there is no evidence that community leaders attempted to persuade Jews to stay in the neighborhood. Instead, these leaders directed the bulk of their efforts to reconstituting Jewish life in the section of the city where the majority of Jews were now settling.

Among Jewish business owners, however, one can observe the stirrings of a new con- sciousness about the relationship between neighborhood stability and the politics of race in the United States. While most Jewish residents left the Hastings Street neighborhood,

11 Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 285–371; Bolkosky, Harmony and Dissonance, 17–19, 185, 437. 12 On the concept of a Jewish neighborhood, see Goldschmidt, Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of

Crown Heights, 76–115; and Deborah Dash Moore, “On the Fringes of the City: Jewish Neighborhoods in Three Boroughs,” in The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900–1940, ed. David Ward and Olivier Zunz (New York, 1992), 252–72. On neighborhood geography and identity, see Bryant Simon, Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (New York, 2004), 63–82. On Jews and knowledge of other Jewish urban residents, see Mandell (“Bill”) Berman interview by Judy Cantor, Oct. 9, 1990, transcript, p. 13, (Congregation Shaarey Zedek, Southfield, Mich.). On the Jewish predominance in neighborhood schools, see Bolkosky, Harmony and Dissonance, 185. On parochial schools in Detroit, see Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Seasons of Grace: A History of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit (Detroit, 1990), 443–44.

13 On Jews and the Hastings Street area, see “The Shifting Jewish Districts,” 1923 survey of Detroit Jewish community, attached to Zeldon Cohen to  [Community Relations Committee] Neighborhoods Committee Members, Sept. 24, 1965, folder 2, box 23 (Jewish Community Council Archives, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich.); and Waltzer, “East European Jewish Detroit in the Early Twentieth Century.” On the influx of blacks into Detroit in the 1920s, see Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 287.

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many Jewish-owned shops remained there. In the mid-1930s the black press accused Jewish merchants of hostile conduct toward black customers and employees and of edging out black retail competition. Jewish leftists and liberals, in concert with black leaders from communist and noncommunist organizations, sought to ameliorate the situation. In 1937 local Jewish leaders concerned with the negative publicity persuaded a handful of Jewish shopkeepers who still owned stores in the neighborhood but for the most part no longer resided in it to organize the East Side Merchants Association. According to the group’s publicity, “The purpose of this organization [is] to promote a better relationship between Jewish merchants and their Negro customers.” In Brownsville, a densely Jewish neighbor- hood in Brooklyn, Jewish and black reformers similarly targeted shopkeepers, most of whom no longer dwelled in the area, to convince them that easing racial tensions would stabilize the economic well-being of the neighborhood and their stores.14

In the immediate postwar years, greater numbers of Jews and Jewish institutions turned toward similar forms of local activism to help control the rapidly shifting eco- nomic, political, and cultural landscape within their neighborhoods. The massive wartime population shifts that brought well over 1 million African Americans to northern industrial centers, the postwar slowing of industrial production, and a burgeoning national discussion about prejudice and discrimination all fueled new urban tensions. Housing shortages, compounded by racist federal and state policies, squeezed African Americans into limited and exploitative housing markets while also stimulating new real estate growth on the fringes of cities.15

In cities across the United States, Jews distinguished themselves from other ethnic and religious groups by the rapidity with which they disbanded once-Jewish neighborhoods. Historians explain that a combination of Jews’ cultural patterns and real estate practices enabled Jews to act quickly once they perceived changes in the socioeconomic and racial landscape of their neighborhoods. Much evidence supports these explanations. Detroit had a much higher rate of homeownership by midcentury than did other urban centers, but, even so, only half of all Jews owned homes compared with 70 percent of white Protestants and Catholics. And Jewish institutions, especially synagogues, moved away from city neigh- borhoods in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, and many other cities much faster than did Catholic churches bound to the geography of the parish. Historians have allowed these facts to eclipse the ambivalence that postwar Jews felt about leaving their urban neighborhoods, however, and the attachment they felt to urbanism.16

14 “Facts for Your Information,” n.d., folder 9, box 66 (Jewish Community Council Archives). On Jewish- black relations in Detroit, see also Marshall Field Stevenson, “Points of Departure, Acts of Resolve: Black-Jewish Relations in Detroit, 1937–1962” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1988), 97–100. On Jewish liberal and leftist alliances in Detroit in the 1930s and early 1940s, see Steve Babson, Dave Riddle, and David Elsila, The Color of Law: Ernie Goodman, Detroit, and the Struggle for Labor and Civil Rights (Detroit, 2010), 34–36, 199– 232. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 60–62, 72.

15 For an overview of the federal policies that stimulated suburban development, see Adam Rome, The Bull- dozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York, 2001), 19–43. On black migration to the North, see Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, 2010). On postwar economic shifts, see Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York, 1982). On national attitudes toward discrimination, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001).

16 On homeownership, see David Goldberg and Harry Sharp, “Some Characteristics of Detroit Area Jewish and Non-Jewish Adults,” in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (Glencoe, 1958), 115; Gamm, Urban Exodus, 51–55; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 189–94; and John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996), 18. On

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Most postwar Jewish urban communities established local- and individual-oriented campaigns, often filtered through local community councils, to save what was always termed the “changing” Jewish neighborhood. Such campaigns unfolded in the context of a new liberal post-Holocaust discourse about racism that located the origin of prejudice in individuals’ attitudes and the remedies to prejudice in education-based efforts to reform the individual. Accordingly, one’s behavior (for instance, how one reacted to a new black neighbor) and the existence or absence of racism in the United States was assumed to be in close alignment. Only beginning in the late 1950s did liberal discourse shift to embrace broader remedies to racism, where law and policy, not individuals’ atti- tudes and decisions, were identified as the agents of urban transformation. In the 1940s, however, Jews imagined their political framework as a local and Jewish one and believed that they could affect political change through the sum of their actions.17

Grassroots Politics, Jewish Survival, and Integration in “Changing” Neighborhoods

A survey in the late 1940s found that only 49 percent of Detroit Jews lived in the Twelfth Street–Linwood–Dexter neighborhood compared with 80 percent less than a decade earlier. An accompanying report described Jewish homeowners as “in a state of near hysteria,” fearful of being unable to sell their homes and becoming stranded in a nonwhite and non-Jewish neighborhood.18 Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s prominent and often outspokenly liberal Jews committed themselves to persuading fellow Jews to stay put and embrace a racially integrated yet still Jewish vision of the Twelfth Street–Linwood–Dexter neighborhood. In 1947 they formed the Midtown Neighborhood Council. Blurring the language of Jewish survival and racial justice, local campaigns to preserve Jewish urban neighborhoods were a critical though short-lived stage in the development of a new Jewish urban politics.

Central to the local campaign to save the Jewish neighborhood was Detroit’s Jewish Community Council, an organization in which many of the neighborhood activists had long been members and leaders. Founded in 1936, the Jewish Community Council answered the needs of predominantly Yiddish-speaking, leftist, Eastern European–born Jews who felt marginalized by the German-Jewish elite in Detroit. By the 1940s Jewish community councils throughout the urban United States provided organizational homes for Jewish leaders invested in preserving a Jewish urban presence and committed to a liberal urban politics of racial justice and integration.19 That many of the leading Jewish

urban attachment among city dwellers more generally, see Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago, 2005).

17 For a list published by the National Community Relations Advisory Council of over 20 cities with active Jewish community councils involved in efforts to stem neighborhood change, see A Guide to Changing Neighbor- hoods: A Manual of Guidance for Dealing with Intergroup Relations Problems in the Neighborhood Undergoing Change (New York, 1956), 15, folder 1, box 86 (Jewish Community Council Archives). On the shifting rhetoric of race, see Berman, Speaking of Jews, 96–98; Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Waltham, 2006), 24–57; Susan A. Glenn, “The Vogue of Jewish Self-Hatred in Post–World War II America,” Jewish Social Studies, 12 (Spring–Summer 2006), 95–136; and Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston, 1995).

18 Guide to Changing Neighborhoods, 15. On neighborhood demographics, see Bolkosky, Harmony and Disso- nance, 185, 298.

19 Kurt Peiser and William Boxerman, “Forward Steps in Jewish Community Organization: Recent Experi- ences in Detroit,” Jewish Social Service Quarterly, 14 (Dec. 1937), 240–50. On the Jewish Community Council,

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organizations supporting local efforts for residential integration were at least as commit- ted to Jewish survival as they were to racial justice created a situation that was compli- cated at best, untenable at worst. Could a Jewish neighborhood endure as a racially integrated neighborhood, and was this question as seemingly absurd as asking whether a white neighborhood could endure as a racially integrated neighborhood?

The Midtown Neighborhood Council resembled in form hundreds of other white neighborhood and homeowners associations that emerged in postwar Detroit and across the United States. The formation of a neighborhood association was a common response to property owners’ fears that their neighborhood was losing its status and stability, often because of the entrance of nonwhites into it. Community meetings at homes and school auditoriums, homegrown leadership, and neighborhood-based activities were typical of these associations. Neighborhood associations generally thrived on social coercion and peer pressure. For example, a 1947 publicity flyer explained, “The Midtown Neighbor- hood Council is a representative group of your friends and neighbors who have joined hands to help improve the area in which we live.”20

While the Midtown Neighborhood Council resembled other white urban neighbor- hood associations in form, its ideals made it distinctive. Unlike many surrounding neigh- borhood associations, it repudiated intimidation and violence against African Americans as strategies for preserving the character of the neighborhood. A report generated almost a decade later celebrated the Twelfth Street neighborhood as “the only area in the city where in-migration of Negro families produced no violence, no picketing and no threats.”21

Instead of turning to physical intimidation, supporters of the Midtown Neighborhood Council used their organizing skills to build an emotionally percussive case that equated Jews’ collective commitment to the neighborhood with their commitment to Jewish sur- vival and racial justice. Yet in its actions, the Midtown Neighborhood Council appeared to be weighing the relative value of residential integration against the goal of maintaining a Jewish neighborhood. Never able to articulate a clear vision of how those two goals would be reconciled, the leaders of the group often fell prey to contradictory and even racist state- ments about the relationship between black and Jewish life. Furthermore, the leaders failed to acknowledge the racist structures—beyond individual attitude—in which Jews were implicated, particularly through their real estate transactions.

Throughout the mid-1940s the Jewish Community Council dispatched teams of grad- uate student interviewers to collect data about residents of the Twelfth Street neighbor- hood, especially those displaying For Sale signs on their property. Interviewers were given specific instructions not only to find out why Jews were selling their homes but also to convince these homeowners to take their homes off the market and join the nascent Midtown Neighborhood Council. Interviewers were directed to tell homeowners that the

see also Walter E. Klein, “The Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit: The Organizing Years,” Mich- igan Jewish History, 18 (Jan. 1978), 20–34; and Amy Shevitz, “Civil Rights, White Flight, and the ‘Jewish Quest for Inclusion,’” paper presented at the 2008 Biennial Scholars’ Conference on American Jewish History (in Lila Corwin Berman’s possession).

20 “Midtown Neighborhood Council: A Community Service,” [1947], folder 9, box 67 (Jewish Community Council Archives). On neighborhood associations, see Freund, Colored Property, 243–83; Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (New York, 2000), 172–96; and Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 209–58.

21 Report by S. J. Fauman and Eleanor Wolf, [mid-1950s], folder 2, box 552 (Jewish Community Council Archives).

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drop in real estate values was a temporary one, exacerbated by “fear and panic,” and they were armed with data to prove that the neighborhood was neither becoming too black nor depreciating, two issues that white homeowners perceived as intimately connected. According to Jewish Community Council reports, only one hundred African American families had settled in the broad vicinity of the neighborhood, and even fewer nonwhites resided in the core of the neighborhood. With these statistics interviewers reassured homeowners that the neighborhood was still white, Jewish, and a sound investment.22

Yet the guidelines also provided another set of rhetorical cues to convince Jews to stay in the neighborhood. Interviewers were encouraged to analogize Jewish experiences with the struggles of African Americans. To the question, “Is what they say about Negroes true?” interviewers were told to respond, “No! Remember, the same things are said about Jews.” The last line of the interviewers’ guide reiterated, “Remember—Prejudice against Negroes is part of the same social disease as anti-Semitism.” The belief that residential discrimination was a slippery slope—if white Americans practiced it against African Americans they also would eventually sanction it against Jews—undoubtedly drove many Detroit Jews to support integration and distinguish the pathway of Jewish politics from that of many other American ethnic groups.23

When contemplating the integration of their neighborhoods, however, Jews were com- pelled to define what, precisely, made a neighborhood a Jewish neighborhood. After all, Jews had lived alongside Catholics hailing from many European nations without worrying about whether the neighborhood was still Jewish. Assumed Jewish spaces were rarely entirely Jewish, a reality often inconsequential to how Jews thought about those spaces. Still, the presence of African Americans fundamentally changed how Jews imagined their neighborhood. By the middle of the twentieth century, lending codes, property-assessment practices, zoning ordinances, and restrictive covenants militated against mixed-race residen- tial space. Furthermore, those policies deprived blacks of legal protections against duplici- tous and unregulated home-financing schemes and led to massive fluctuations in home values that offered quick gain for some and rapid loss for others. A Jewish real estate agent, for example, wrote the Jewish Community Council in 1947 with a list of Jewish agents (including himself) who had recently sold homes to black families. He suggested that these agents were willing to weather the ire of local Jewish homeowners, in part, because their profits for a sale to a black person far exceeded what they could make from selling the same home to a white person. The Jewish Community Council received other reports that year of Jewish landlords evicting white tenants in favor of black ones who would pay higher rents. Contrary to what liberal Jews hoped to prove, the housing market was not race blind, a reality that Jewish liberals only started to confront in the 1950s when they sought to reform real estate agents’ behavior.24

In a later assessment, the Jewish Community Council deemed their house-to-house interviews a success. Some property owners were convinced to take their homes off the market or at least remove For Sale signs, which “gave visible evidence to the passer-by of

22 Manual for Interviewers in 12th Street Area, Nov. 6, 1946, pp. 1–2, folder 6, box 15, ibid.; “Instructions to Interviewers Midtown Facilities Survey,” [late 1940s], folder 5, box 584, ibid.; John Feild to Director, July 17, 1947, memo, ibid.

23 Manual for Interviewers in 12th Street Area, 2; Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, 2000), 164–90.

24 B. Edelman of Edelman Realty to Jewish Community Council, May 7, 1947, folder 5, box 15 (Jewish Community Council Archives); S. Stahle to Jewish Community Council, June 2, 1947, ibid.

502 The Journal of American History September 2012

preparation for flight.” However, the Jewish Community Council likely inflated the demographic stability of the neighborhood by including newly settled displaced persons from World War II in its statistics and by extending the boundaries of the neighborhood to include wealthier Jewish areas to the north and west.25 Time would show that these efforts did not keep Jews in the neighborhood. In the short term, however, the interviews helped galvanize a local movement among Jews to preserve and save their neighborhood.

In the spring of 1947 posters and five thousand flyers publicized a massive clean-up campaign that drew attention to the role individuals played in stemming the tide of neighborhood decline. With special attention to newcomers, mainly black families that leaders imagined might not know how to maintain middle-class homes, the Midtown Neighborhood Council distributed a list of “Ten Do’s” and “Ten Don’ts” about neigh- borhood and home maintenance. While its efforts concentrated on individual remedies to neighborhood deterioration, the Midtown Neighborhood Council was at least aware that actions by the city could thwart individuals’ attempts to stabilize their neighbor- hoods. Residents repeatedly complained about rat infestations and linked the problem to the city’s increasing negligence regarding trash collection. In the late 1940s neighbor- hood leaders lobbied the city for more efficient garbage disposal, new traffic lights, better playgrounds, and more parking facilities near commercial areas. There is no evidence that the city responded to these pleas, but the requests indicate a growing awareness among neighborhood leaders of the limits of local activism.26

As historians have noted, neighborhood-based politics relied heavily on the participa- tion of women. Of the individuals mentioned in the coverage by the Jewish press of the Midtown Neighborhood Council, roughly one-third were women. These generally middle-class women tended to have more flexible schedules and more knowledge about daily neighborhood life than did men. They noticed when the racial composition of their children’s classes shifted and the number of children per classroom increased or when, as one woman observed, nearby stores appeared to be “catering to the colored,” and they also talked regularly to their neighbors. Furthermore, they were almost always the ones who answered the door when interviewers and surveyors knocked during the day. Thus their involvement in neighborhood politics corresponded to the role they played in maintaining the neighborhood and assessing whether it was remaining a Jewish space.27

25 Report by Fauman and Wolf. Guide to Changing Neighborhoods, 16. On criticism of the Jewish Community Council’s demographic statistics, see Bernard Rosenberg, “Afro-Jewish Americans: The Case of Twelfth Street Detroit,” [1950], folder 5, box 584 (Jewish Community Council Archives). On postwar displaced persons in Detroit, see Sidney M. Bolkosky, “Detroit’s Reactions to the Holocaust and the New Immigrants,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, 49 (June 2000), 309–22.

26 “Midtown Council to Hear Talk by Citizen of Month,” Detroit Jewish News, Jan. 9, 1948, clipping, folder 6, box 15 (Jewish Community Council Archives); “Neighborhood Sub-committee,” Jan. 21, 1947, meeting notes, ibid. On press coverage for clean-up drives, see Louis Fraiberg to Benedict Glazer and Lawrence Crohn, April 16, April 25, 1947, ibid. On lobbying the city for improvement, see Midtown Neighborhood Council minutes, June 1, June 8, 1948, folder 9, box 67, ibid.; Midtown Facilities Study Questionnaire, [1949], folder 5, box 584, ibid.; and Guide to Changing Neighborhoods, 15–18. On city governments’ neglect of neighborhoods with growing black populations, see Will Cooley, “Moving on Out: Black Pioneering in Chicago, 1915–1950,” Journal of Urban History, 36 (July 2010), 489.

27 “Action Planned by New Mid-town Council,” Detroit Jewish News, Nov. 11, 1947, clipping, folder 6, box 15 (Jewish Community Council Archives); Danny Raskin, “Listening,” Detroit Jewish News, April 11, 1947, clip- ping, ibid.; “12th Street Area ‘Model’ in Cleanup Campaign,” Detroit Jewish News, April 4, 1947, clipping, ibid.; “Midtown Council to Hear Talk by Citizen of Month”; “Council Calls Owners of 12th Street Property,” Detroit Jewish Chronicle, [1947], clipping, ibid. Nathan Shur to Jewish Community Council, Nov. 19, 1947, ibid. On

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Nevertheless, these local efforts relied on the active involvement of prominent com- munity leaders—almost entirely men—who lent the movement credibility and authority. In this regard, rabbis, whose synagogues dotted the Twelfth Street neighborhood, were crucial participants in the Midtown Neighborhood Council’s efforts. In a letter sent to neighborhood rabbis in the fall of 1947 the president of the Jewish Community Council requested that the rabbis use their upcoming High Holiday sermons to “promote harmony between the various groups living in the Twelfth Street area” and advise their congregants against panic selling and abandoning the neighborhood. Rabbis were also asked to deny rumors that their synagogues were planning exit strategies from the neigh- borhood. Most neighborhood rabbis took an active role in the Jewish Community Coun- cil’s work since they knew that their institutions’ survival depended upon the ongoing presence of Jews in the neighborhood, and many were firm believers in the ideals of integration. At the same time, synagogue records prove that rabbis and congregational leaders quietly made plans to leave the neighborhood and the city, discreetly buying tracts of land in the suburbs in the early 1950s.28

Even as Jewish Community Council leaders realized that neighborhood synagogues were ambivalent allies in the effort to preserve the Jewish neighborhood, they also under- stood the instrumental value of having religion on their side during the Cold War years. By the late 1940s groups advocating integration and fair housing were under increased governmental scrutiny for sowing seeds of national discord and aligning with communist interests. In 1947 the director of internal relations for Detroit’s Jewish Community Council cautioned leaders that a “strong left wing element . . . is ready to step in and take control unless we are careful.” In earlier years the Jewish Community Council had col- laborated with leftist organizations on many civil rights initiatives. Yet when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began investigating communist activity in Detroit in the early 1950s, the Jewish Community Council strongly admonished its members to sever ties with Jewish-dominated leftist civil rights and labor groups. Liberal Jewish orga- nizations across the country took similar steps.29 The impact on interracial politics was profound; for the previous two decades, whites, among them a disproportionate number of Jews, and blacks had found common ground in leftist (communist and noncommu- nist) politics, yet the anticommunism crusade eroded this terrain. Likewise, Cold War anticommunism created an ever-widening chasm between liberals and leftists.

women’s participation in neighborhood politics, see Lila Corwin Berman, “Gendered Journeys: Jewish Migrations and the City in Postwar America,” in Gender and Jewish History, ed. Marion A. Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington, 2011), 336–49; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Prince- ton, 2001), 87; Murray, Progressive Housewife; and Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago, 2002), 41.

28 Aaron Droock to rabbis, Sept. 11, 1947, folder 6, box 15 (Jewish Community Council Archives). For exam- ples of denying rumors, see announcement from Congregation Beth Yehudah (in Yiddish), Dec. 1947, ibid.; and Fraiberg to Shmarya Kleinman, A. C. Lappin, Morris Lieberman, and Louis Rosenzweig, Jan. 6, 1948, ibid. Con- gregation Shaarey Zedek (Conservative) and Temple Beth El (Reform) bought land in the suburbs in the early 1950s. See Irving Katz to Rabbi Richard Hertz, June 4, 1953 (Franklin Archives); and Shaarey Zedek board meeting minutes, April 19, 1948 (Congregation Shaarey Zedek).

29 Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (New York, 2010), 125–29. On concerns about leftists and the Jewish Community Council, see Fraiberg to Oscar Cohen, Oct. 24, 1947, folder 6, box 15 (Jewish Community Council Archives); and Guide to Changing Neighborhoods, 36. On purges in Detroit, see Babson, Riddle, and Elsila, Color of Law, 201–9. More generally, see Stuart Svonkin, Jews against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties (New York, 1997), 113–34.

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Over time, Jewish leaders came to appreciate the many advantages of attaching them- selves to liberal political movements beyond their neighborhoods. In the 1940s Jews had regarded the racial change occurring in Jewish neighborhoods as a Jewish issue and attempted to address it through local and Jewish means. Yet by the early 1950s Jewish leaders saw less and less to recommend this approach. Most Jews had moved away from “changing” neighborhoods, and those Jews who had vocally welcomed black families and sought to create a viable politics of integration had become targets of anticommunist suspicion. Increasingly, Jewish leaders perceived the individual, the neighborhood, and the local as far less powerful political tools for affecting change in American life than the new urban politics of liberal coalition building, and legislative and policy reform.

The Problem with Neighborhood Politics

By the early 1950s Detroit Jewish activists were frustrated with the meager results their local politics appeared to be yielding in the Twelfth Street–Linwood–Dexter neighbor- hood. During a 1950 meeting Jewish Community Council leaders expressed their exas- peration: “There are probably few areas in the city where there is a higher proportion of people endowed with a liberalism . . . with respect to racial, religious, and cultural differ- ences. . . . If there is any place in town where a stable, cosmopolitan community can be maintained this should be it.” But it was not. For Sale signs and the constant parade of moving vans marred activists’ vision of an effective local campaign to save the Jewish neighborhood and create a stable integrated community. Over the course of the 1950s, the neighborhood shifted from housing 49 percent of Detroit’s Jewish population to no more than 9 percent of it.30 The Midtown Neighborhood Council did not give up, but its faith in local activism was waning.

A comparison of two neighborhood manifestos, one from 1947 and the other written in the early 1950s, reveals the gradual shift in Jewish political activism away from local and individual methods and toward remote political activism that neither blamed indi- viduals for neighborhood transformations nor believed that their actions could ameliorate those changes. In 1947 the Jewish Community Council, in concert with the emerging Midtown Neighborhood Council, had papered the neighborhood with a leaflet printed in English and Yiddish entitled “Let’s Think Clearly.” A call to action for the neighbor- hood, it maintained that rumors alone were fueling a real estate panic and averred, “Jews should and can live in harmonious relationship with our neighbors and at the same time continue to utilize the cultural and spiritual advantages of Jewish group life in this area.” The leaflet ended with an announcement of a community meeting and a stirring affirma- tion of the power of local action: “Friendly relationships with and understanding of one’s neighbors and the combating of prejudice are attributes of the truly American way of life. These are also the precepts which make for Jewish living. Actions based on these principles will result in a better and more wholesome neighborhood.”31

A few years later, the Jewish Community Council released a new statement called “Neighbor, Where Are You Running?” Distributed throughout the neighborhood and

30 Jewish Community Council minutes, Sept. 14, 1950, folder 1, box 68 (Jewish Community Council Archives). Bolkosky, Harmony and Dissonance, 298.

31 “Let’s Think Clearly,” leaflet attached to Statement about the Twelfth Street Area by the Jewish Community Council of Detroit, Dec. 1947, folder 6, box 15 (Jewish Community Council Archives).

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also reprinted in the local press, the leaflet struck an ominous tone. No longer were residents beseeched to “think clearly”; they were now told to stop “running.” And no longer were Jewish individuals assured that they could combat prejudice by cultivating friendly relationships with their nonwhite neighbors. Instead, they were informed that whether or not they realized it, “unscrupulous real estate dealers” were manipulating them “into leaving a good home [and] neighborhood near the downtown area for another of very doubtful value and probably overpriced.” Less reliant on goodwill than the earlier document, the 1950s statement invoked constitutional law—recent Supreme Court rulings on fair housing and citizenship—as a means of intimidation, warning resi- dents not to do anything “foolish” that would put them on the wrong side of the law. Printed on the back of the leaflet was a Not for Sale sign that Jews were encouraged to display in their front yard.32

By the early 1950s, Jewish leaders in urban neighborhoods throughout the United States were waging a battle against real estate agents, many of whom, not coincidentally, were Jews. These leaders feared that the good intentions of individuals were no match for the profiteering of real estate agents who sowed the seeds of panic to reap the rewards from home sales. Portraying residents as helpless in the face of real estate mendacity, a Detroit correspondent to the Jewish Daily Forward reported, “Residents of the area have informed Council representatives that they have been visited daily, solicited by daily phone calls and have received abundant literature from [real estate agents].” According to the reporter, real estate agents profited from getting homeowners to believe that their neighborhood was “changing in its racial character” and that their home values would plummet if they did not sell quickly. In tandem with the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (), the Jewish Community Council collected data on advertisements for homes in the Twelfth Street–Linwood– Dexter area in the late 1940s and discovered that Jewish and African American agents persistently characterized the properties they were selling as suited for “colored” people. Furthermore, a survey in the mid-1950s found that 60 percent of residents living in a particular enclave of the neighborhood that remained heavily Jewish received solicitations from real estate agents “once a week or just about every day.” These “blockbusting” tactics were common, and real estate agents across the country used them to purchase homes below market value from panicked whites and then sell them at an inflated price, often through exploitative financing, to house-hungry black buyers.33

32 “Neighbor, Where Are You Running?,” reprinted in Michigan Chronicle, July 15, 1950, clipping, folder 1, box 68, ibid. “Neighbor, Where Are You Running?,” leaflet, 1950, folder 4, box 68, ibid. Though they did not mention particular Supreme Court cases, the authors of the statement were likely referring to Shelley v. Kraemer, which struck down the legal enforcement of racially motivated restrictive covenants in housing, and possibly Knauer v. United States, a case that examined naturalization policy and argued that the United States did not grant “second-class citizenship.” Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Knauer v. United States, 328 U.S. 654, 658 (1946).

33 David Naimark, “This Week in Detroit,” Jewish Daily Forward, June 12, 1950. For a translation of this article, see folder 4, box 68 (Jewish Community Council Archives). Joseph Fauman to Ed Swan (of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), [1950], folder 1, box 68, ibid. Eleanor K. Caplan and Eleanor P. Wolf, “Factors Affecting Racial Change in Two Middle Income Housing Areas,” Phylon, 21 (no. 3, 1960), 230. Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham, N.C., 2005), 84–117. On similar patterns in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago, see Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (New York, 2004), 45–52; Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood, 89–210; Ellsworth Rosen, “When a Negro Moves Next Door,” Saturday Evening Post, April 4, 1959, pp. 32–33, 139–42, reprint, folder 1, box 552 (Jewish Community Council Archives); and Satter, Family Properties, 171.

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In the mid-1940s George Schermer, a non-Jew, had been appointed by Republican mayor Edward Jeffries as the director of the Mayor’s Interracial Committee. He worked alongside African American leaders to highlight the sources of black-white tension and, particularly, housing discrimination. In a report documenting the role of white ethnic groups in housing discrimination, Schermer contended that although Jews were rarely hostile to black settlement, they nonetheless bore a special burden and responsibility to quell racial tension over housing issues. He found that anti-Semitism pervaded both white and black responses to housing problems, so Jews were consistently perceived as central actors. He also understood that Jews’ real estate dealings often caused racial tension, convincing whites that Jews brought blacks into the neighborhood and convinc- ing blacks that Jews took advantage of blacks’ powerlessness in the housing market. In private conversations with Jewish leaders in 1950, Schermer encouraged them to con- front Jews involved in the real estate industry.34

In 1950 the Jewish Community Council invited a handful of Jewish real estate agents to discuss the Twelfth Street–Linwood–Dexter neighborhood. A council leader chastised the agents for endangering “communal property and institutional investments” through their “immoral” efforts to “creat[e] artificial panic for financial gains.” Yet those words rang hollow when another council leader backpedaled to reassure the group that the council “eagerly” supported integration and that the meeting should not “be interpreted as an anti-Negro one.”35 Yet how could it not be?

Jewish leaders lacked the language to explain what distinguished selling a property to a black family from destroying a Jewish neighborhood. Thus most leaders focused only on the problem of panic selling. They did not interrogate the racist structures that enabled individuals to profit from driving whites out of neighborhoods and selling homes at inflated prices and with exploitative financing schemes to blacks. A Detroit Jewish real estate agent fumed in a letter to the Jewish Community Council that its leaders were hypocrites for endorsing “biracial housing” while vilifying agents who sold to nonwhites as “blockbusting.”36 Indeed, the same Not for Sale sign that Jewish Community Council leaders had hoped would communicate a local commitment to an ongoing Jewish urban presence could also be read as a populist attack against integration—a de facto restrictive covenant.

As Schermer witnessed the growing power of the Republican Albert Cobo’s conserva- tive and racist mayoral administration that took office in 1950, he became disillusioned with liberals’ local efforts to preserve stable neighborhoods. In the early 1950s the  filed a lawsuit charging the mayor and the housing commission with discrimination. At the same time, Schermer spoke out against the entrenched racism in the housing system that was impervious to individual- and neighborhood-based reform. Schermer urged Jews in particular to be leaders in establishing a “free open unrestricted housing market” across the city. After writing a scathing report that exposed the depths of racism in Detroit’s private and public housing system and gained attention from housing activists nationwide, Schermer resigned under pressure in 1952. The following year, Mayor Cobo

34 “Process Record of a Meeting Called to Explore the Current Social Situation in the Mid-town Area and to Determine the Most Effective Use of the Community Council Staff Assigned,” April 18, 1950, folder 9, box 67 (Jewish Community Council Archives); Stevenson, “Points of Departure, Acts of Resolve,” 164–67.

35 Julius Weinberg, memo, June 6, 1950, folder 68, box 1 (Jewish Community Council Archives). 36 Bernard Edelman to Jewish Community Council, [1950–1951], folder 8, box 68, ibid.

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dissolved the Interracial Committee.37 Yet cynicism about local neighborhood politics and demands for large-scale Jewish-led urban reform came to characterize a new mode of Jewish urban politics remote from the Jewish neighborhood.

Urban Politics beyond the Neighborhood

By the mid-1950s the northwest area, named for its location in relation to downtown, had become the new center of Jewish settlement in Detroit. People strolling the streets of northwest Detroit could easily think they were in the suburbs—after all, the neighbor- hood was just about as close as one could get to the suburbs without leaving the city limits. The homes were large and the lawns ample; families owned cars; men generally commuted downtown to white-collar jobs; and the local high school prepared young people for college. The Jewish Community Center, along with several synagogues, estab- lished satellite facilities in the northwest area, and rumors circulated that many of these institutions were planning to sell their Twelfth Street–Linwood–Dexter buildings. Until the early 1960s the northwest area remained a white bastion and housed approximately 60 percent of Detroit’s Jews.38

Northwest Detroit served as a transitional political space. Here Jews turned the focus of their politics away from the local neighborhood efforts that had marked their lives in the more southern regions of the city and toward a remote and policy-oriented strategy. The problems of race and neighborhood stability, they came to believe, would be solved neither by communal browbeating and organizing nor by staying in increasingly African American neighborhoods suffering from infrastructural neglect, overcrowding, and other signs of deterioration. Rather, the community could address these problems by lobbying for legislative and policy changes to equalize the treatment blacks and whites received, especially regarding issues of housing. This form of political activism was more public and far reaching than local neighborhood activism, but it also demanded less perceived sacrifice from individual Jewish families or the Jewish community as a whole.

Jews’ fervent embrace of the principle of open occupancy resembled that of other white liberals’ investment in the issue yet was driven by specifically Jewish motivations. In the 1950s and 1960s Jews in Detroit and other northern industrial cities came to see their neighborhoods as special targets of black settlement. A 1956 manual addressed to Jewish urban leaders dealing with “Problems in the Neighborhood Undergoing Change” asserted plainly, “Jews are more often involved in changing neighborhood problems [than other groups].” Published through the New York City–based National Commu- nity Relations Advisory Council (), the manual included contributions from Jewish urban activists throughout the nation. Relying on population studies, the authors explained that fifteen of the eighty-seven substantial U.S. Jewish communities (defined

37 On George Schermer and calls for an unrestricted housing market, see George Schermer, “New Neighbors and Property Values,” Feb. 11, 1952, speech to the Study Conference for Women of the Metropolitan Detroit Area, folder 3, box 284, ibid.; “Report of the Changing Neighborhoods Subcommittee,” Oct. 26, 1955, folder 5, box 534, ibid.; Stevenson, “Points of Departure, Acts of Resolve,” 380–84; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 225; and “George Schermer, Rights Expert, Dies at 78,” New York Times, June 6, 1989, p. D22.

38 Phillip Applebaum, A Tour of Jewish Detroit (Detroit, 1975), 9; Bolkosky, Harmony and Dissonance, 298; Changing Neighborhoods Committee, informal meeting of special personnel minutes, Aug. 5, 1959, folder 3, box 6 (Jewish Community Council Archives); Abraham Citron to Kleinman and the Changing Neighborhood Com- mittee, Aug. 11, 1959, ibid.

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as communities with populations over four thousand) had experienced a doubling of their nonwhite population from 1940 to 1950, and another thirteen had seen their non- white population increase by one-third. These rates, the authors implied, far outpaced the rates in non-Jewish communities.39

Urban Jewish leaders offered many reasons why African Americans settled in Jewish neighborhoods, including perceived Jewish liberalism and the fact that Jews tended to live in areas marked by high rates of mobility and turnover. Urban leaders also suggested that African Americans were not simply attracted to Jewish neighborhoods; rather, they were directed to those neighborhoods by city and state policies that pushed black home buyers and renters out of the open housing market.40

Jewish urban leaders in the 1950s started to advocate political activism that was not confined to their local neighborhood. Responding to their growing belief that their neigh- borhoods were subject to forces beyond their control and owing to their reluctance to confront the implications of Jews’ involvement in racist real estate practices, many leaders

The maps on these facing pages show northwest Detroit and the suburban communities in Oakland County situated north of the Detroit/Wayne County border. Despite efforts by Jewish leaders to slow migration away from the central city, from 1950 to 1960 large segments of the Jewish population of Detroit moved to the northwest corner of the city and also began to establish a presence in the inner suburbs to the north. Data from United States Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population, 1950 (Washington, 1952); United States Bureau of the Census, U.S. Censuses of Population and Housing, 1960 (Washington, 1962); and Albert J. Mayer, Jewish Population Study: 1963; Number of Persons, Age, and Residential Distribution (Detroit, 1964). Maps by Patricia Becker and Douglas Towns.

39 Guide to Changing Neighborhoods, 46, 48. 40 On black buyers and renters being directed to Jewish neighborhoods, see Levine and Harmon, Death of an

American Jewish Community, 66–91.

Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond 509

turned toward citywide remedies to reform housing policy. A leader of Detroit’s Jewish Community Council demanded that revisions be made to an early draft of the 1956 manual published by the  to highlight “the stake of the Jewish community in . . . helping to achieve equality of opportunity in acquiring housing throughout a city.” The final version of the manual did indeed frame the issue of Jewish neighborhood stability in a broad discussion of housing discrimination. It stated, “An increasing number of cities today face serious problems caused by changes in the racial character of particular neigh- borhoods. These problems would be substantially lessened if the housing market were not restricted by discriminatory practices. Such practices prevent the natural and gradual move- ment of families . . . in all parts of the city in accordance with their means and desires.”41

Jews were leading voices in the effort to remake housing policy. Many other liberal whites echoed Jews’ commitment to open-occupancy legislation, but Jews positioned themselves as intimately and emotionally invested in the policy, explaining that their neighborhoods in particular bore the scars of racist housing policy, even if most Jews had long left these neighborhoods. At meetings in the early 1960s Jewish Community Council leaders committed to policy activism, premised upon coalition politics and broad-scale campaigns for fair-housing practices. Dr. Shmarya Kleinman, the chair of the Jewish Community Council’s Changing Neighborhood Committee, explained, “It has now been universally recognized that work in neighborhoods, in blocks, even in areas of the city, will not alone be effective in normalizing housing patterns and in stabilizing neighborhoods on an integrated basis. . . . Times have changed.” In the fall of 1961,

41 “Detroit Comments on Draft of the Guide for Dealing with Changing Neighborhoods,” [1955–1956], folder 4, box 82 (Jewish Community Council Archives). Guide to Changing Neighborhoods, 9.

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reviewing the accomplishments of the Jewish Community Council’s recently renamed Neighborhoods and Housing Committee (formerly Changing Neighborhood Commit- tee) over the past two years, Kleinman declared that a “major shift in orientation and practical aims” had occurred, palpable even in the new name of the committee, which had been the subject of passionate discussion over the past year. “We are no longer in the patch-up or remedial business to stop panic, but are working to destroy all the props of discrimination in housing,” Kleinman explained, adding, “We consider that this is not only a Jewish issue, nor just a neighborhood issue, but a city, state and national issue.”42

Instead of implementing neighborhood clean-up drives, Jewish leaders devoted them- selves to meeting with “tri-faith” and “city-wide” religious leaders, establishing the Greater Detroit Committee for Fair Housing Practices, and issuing public statements trumpeting nationwide open-occupancy and fair-housing policies. They asserted that new policies, with broad-based support, would destroy the “props of discrimination” that they believed had doomed their local neighborhood activism.43

Throughout the early 1960s urban Jewish community groups across the country pledged themselves to the cause of fair housing, maintaining that if the law prohibited homeowners and landlords from using race as a factor in sale or rental decisions then black settlement would occur equally across urban landscapes, eventually dismantling urban discrimination. That Jewish activists committed themselves to policy and legislative remedies for urban housing and discrimination just as they were leaving their urban neighborhoods is no irony—it reveals the contours of a new Jewish geography of remote urban politics.

Remote Urban Activism

In 1961 Jews living in northwest Detroit formed a new neighborhood association, the Bagley Community Council. It operated from one of the last significant Jewish settle- ments in the city, yet served as a site for political mobilization on issues such as housing policy and racial discrimination that moved Jews well beyond neighborhood politics. On its face, the organization emerged from a local political sensibility. Much like the foun- ders of the Midtown Neighborhood Council, the active members of the Bagley Commu- nity Council were predominantly Jewish homeowners concerned with preserving the character of their neighborhood. The Bagley neighborhood, a roughly one-square-mile area, was residential, with stately single-family, two-story homes. Of the four thousand families who lived there in 1962, 66 percent were Jewish and less than .05 percent were African American. Similar to the Midtown Neighborhood Council, the Bagley Commu- nity Council organized neighborhood meetings, encouraged residents to tidy up their homes and lawns, and attempted to stop real estate agents from stirring up panic among homeowners. And just as it had for the Midtown Neighborhood Council, the Jewish Community Council played a critical role in supporting the Bagley Community Council, providing staff and helping sculpt its agenda.44

42 Changing Neighborhood Committee minutes, March 9, 1960, folder 4, box 4 (Jewish Community Council Archives). Neighborhoods and Housing Committee minutes, Nov. 28, 1961, ibid.

43 Neighborhoods and Housing Committee minutes, Nov. 28, 1961, ibid., 1; Jewish Community Council, “Statement on Open Occupancy,” Feb. 1961, ibid.

44 On the Bagley neighborhood, see Eleanor Paperro Wolf and Charles N. Lebeaux, Change and Renewal in an Urban Community (New York, 1969); and Damon Stetson, “Community Finds Integration Key: Detroit Neigh- borhood Group Is Hailed for Approach,” New York Times, April 22, 1962, p. 64.

Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond 511

Yet the two neighborhood associations, separated by more than a decade and about five miles, pursued very different political strategies. Whereas the Midtown Neighbor- hood Council had focused on convincing individual homeowners to remain in the neigh- borhood, the Bagley Community Council tied itself and the stability of urban Jewish neighborhoods to efforts to reform city, state, and federal housing policies. Bagley’s leaders were enmeshed in city and state politics and knew well the vocabulary of open and nondiscriminatory housing practices. Starting in the early 1960s the national offices of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-defamation League kept local leaders abreast of developments in housing law with periodic memos on new rulings across the country, and the National Community Relations Advisory Council asked all of its local Jewish community council affiliates for copies of their statements about housing discrim- ination and fair housing.45

With a deft political touch, the president of the Bagley Community Council, a Jewish man who was also the executive assistant to the Michigan State Highway Commission, explained, “We are not for integration and we are not against integration. We are for an open housing market all through the city.” He assured Jewish residents that the “climate of opinion is changing in favor of fair housing practices,” and, thus, by getting involved with open-occupancy politics, Jews were able to fight for a policy that did not hinge upon their individual willingness to live in integrated neighborhoods.46 The Bagley Com- munity Council hoped to prove that it was in everyone’s interest—liberal and nonliberal, Jewish and non-Jewish—to support fair-housing measures.

Echoing similar proposals in dozens of other U.S. cities to reform housing policy and create open-occupancy laws, Detroit’s city council crafted a Fair Neighborhood Practices Ordinance in 1962, and the Bagley Community Council immediately voted to uphold the measure. The ordinance was initially intended to punish real estate agents and sellers who employed racially discriminatory practices in their transactions, but the final version offered a very limited definition of discrimination. In response, two members of Detroit’s city council proposed a broader and more enforceable open-occupancy law. The measure promised to mandate nondiscriminatory selling practices throughout the city, a promise that Bagley Community Council and Jewish Community Council leaders believed would ease the pressure of black settlement in Jewish neighborhoods and, more impor- tantly, create a more viable and sustainable future for middle-class urban life.47

The transformation in Jewish politics away from local neighborhood activism and toward the broad, more spatially detached goal of fair-housing policy was made possible by Jews’ growing economic and political power in the postwar years. The characteristics that historians suggest turned Jews into whites also served as the foundation for a new Jewish urban politics. Data culled from the University of Michigan Detroit Area Study of the early 1950s found that almost three-quarters of Detroit’s Jewish household heads

45 Paul Hartman (Anti-defamation League), memo, March 13, 1961, folder 2, box 533 (Jewish Community Council Archives); Theodore Leskes (American Jewish Committee), memo, March 30, 1961, ibid.; Samuel Spiegler (Director of Information, National Community Relations Advisory Council), memo, Dec. 28, 1959, folder 1, box 533, ibid.; Jewish Community Council press release, Oct. 3, 1960, folder 6, box 569, ibid.

46 Neighborhood and Housing Committee minutes, Nov. 28, 1961, folder 4, box 4 (Jewish Community Council Archives).

47 On the Fair Neighborhood Practices Ordinance, see Jack Walker, “Fair Housing in Michigan,” in The Poli- tics of Fair-Housing Legislation: State and Local Case Studies, ed. Lynn W. Eley and Thomas W. Casstevens (San Francisco, 1968), 353–82; and Wolf and Lebeaux, Change and Renewal in an Urban Community, 70.

512 The Journal of American History September 2012

(all men) held white-collar jobs. Furthermore, Jews in the city had attained levels of education commensurate with the white Protestant population. Finally, a greater number of Jews than ever before held political posts, due, in part, to gubernatorial and judicial appointments made in the late 1950s. With access to more power, Jews entered into civic discussions about urban reform; at the same time, their access to power also dis- tanced them from the centers of urban poverty and neglect.48

It was no coincidence that one of the sponsors of the new measure for fair-housing practices was a Jewish man, Mel Ravitz (the other was William Patrick, a black city coun- cilor). Ravitz, a committed member of the Jewish Community Council’s Neighborhoods and Housing Committee and a Wayne State University sociologist, had won a seat on the Detroit city council in 1961. In his role in the Jewish community and his elected position on the city council, he became an activist for legislation barring discrimination in housing. Attempting to persuade fellow Neighborhoods and Housing Committee members to turn their attention beyond the Jewish neighborhood, he argued, “All neigh- borhoods must be opened [through fair-housing measures] if pressure is to be relieved on any one neighborhood.” Echoing Schermer, he charged, “It is up to the Jewish commu- nity to furnish leadership on this pressing problem of American communities.”49

Photographed in 1964, this family stands on a street in the heart of Jewish northwest Detroit, very close to the Bagley neighborhood. Courtesy Leonard N. Simons Jewish Community Archives, Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.

48 Goldberg and Sharp, “Some Characteristics of Detroit Area Jewish and Non-Jewish Adults,” 113–15; Sidney Fine, Expanding the Frontiers of Civil Rights: Michigan, 1948–1968 (Detroit, 2000), 98.

49 Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 25. On Mel Ravitz, see the finding guide of the Mel Ravitz Collection Papers, 1939–2001 (Reuther Library), http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/files/UP001720.pdf. Neighborhoods and Housing Committee minutes, Nov. 28, 1961, folder 4, box 4 (Jewish Community Council Archives).

Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond 513

The new open-occupancy proposal, the Patrick-Ravitz ordinance, was met with a counterproposal for a Homeowner’s Rights Ordinance. Though the Homeowner’s Rights Ordinance was clearly grounded in racism, attempting to justify discrimination through the language of individual rights and private property, it resembled the Patrick- Ravitz ordinance in its focus on the individual behaviors of buyers, sellers, and their agents and its tacit tolerance for a racist and unequal economic structure. Yet in the early 1960s few whites in Detroit, whether Jewish or not, voiced the radical critique that open occupancy perpetuated the structural economic inequalities ingrained in American capitalism.50

In the fall of 1964 the Homeowner’s Rights Ordinance came to voters as a city refer- endum. The Jewish Community Council provided staff, equipment, and publicity to the campaign waged against the ordinance by the relatively liberal city leadership. Nonethe- less, the measure passed by 23,000 votes, reflecting the rising strength of white conserva- tism in the city. A court judgment overturned it two years later. When the ordinance passed, the Jewish Community Council emphasized in a press release that “areas contain- ing substantial numbers of Jewish residents voted heavily against the ordinance.” The press release did not mention that substantial numbers of Jews no longer lived in the city or voted in city referenda. Council leaders may have thought this irrelevant owing to the fact that Jews, whether they lived in the city or not, still remained vital participants in discussions about urban housing policy. But the nature of their participation had clearly shifted from one characterized by geographic enmeshment to one of remote, if still pas- sionate, commitment.51

In 1963, as the citywide debate about fair-housing legislation was reaching a fevered pitch, the Jewish Community Council, alongside white and black Protestant pastors and representatives of the Archdiocese of Detroit (Catholic), organized the Metropolitan Con- ference on Open Occupancy. The conference embodied the interfaith coalition politics that liberal groups throughout the city were embracing in their move toward legislative and policy understandings of urban politics. Even the choice of the word Metropolitan in the title, rather than City or Detroit, indicated a new scale of urban commitment beyond the city limits. According to the conference program, the gathering came at the impetus of leaders from various religious groups who had thought, “This is not our problem alone, what are the others doing?” The organizers of the conference explained, “Privately and independently, we were often shocked to realize that we felt more in common with those of other faiths who were dedicated and working on [fair-housing issues], than we did with members of our own faith who were apathetic or negative.” Building on a postwar trend in which religious leaders saw religion more as the material of coalition-building politics than as a specific set of theological premises, Detroit religious leaders joined politicians and social researchers in a plea for open occupancy.52

50 Citizens for a United Detroit, pamphlet, [1964?], folder 4, box 83 (Jewish Community Council Archives). On Jews and open occupancy, see also Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door, 177–78; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 227; and Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 243.

51 Harold Dubin to Walter Klein, [1964–1965?], folder 4, box 83 (Jewish Community Council Archives); Robert Kirk, “Court Kills Homeowners Law,” Detroit News, Dec. 30, 1966, clipping, folder 6, box 83, ibid. Jewish Community Council press release, Sept. 17, 1964, ibid.; Dubin to Klein, [1964–1965?], folder 4, box 83, ibid.

52 “Program for the Metropolitan Conference on Open Occupancy,” Jan. 2–3, 1963, p. 1, folder 3, box 83, ibid. Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York, 1988), 108–35.

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Liberal Jewish leaders such as Ravitz and Rabbi Richard Hertz of the Woodward Avenue Temple Beth El, who both spoke at the conference, believed the more that unfair housing policies were understood as everyone’s problems, the better for Jews. The truth, however, was that fewer and fewer Jews lived in city neighborhoods, so while their politics remained focused on Detroit, their stake in the city had changed from a concrete interest in making the city livable for their community to a more abstract ideal of racial justice and urban stability.

When Rabbi Hertz addressed the audience at the Metropolitan Conference on Open Occupancy, he studiously avoided drawing any connection between Jews’ commitment to racial justice and their willingness to remain in integrated urban areas. The rabbi explained, “My people have had a long history in the battle for open occu- pancy. We have lived in some of the foulest ghettos of the world. We know what it means to be harried and haunted and harassed, the last to benefit and the first to be denied. . . . The freedom to live where one wants is a precious privilege of first class citi- zenship devoutly cherished by Jews of this country.”53 Now that Jews finally had gained the right to live where they wished, they would work hard to ensure others possessed it, but they would not curtail their own freedom of movement in the name of fulfilling a vision of integration. This logic made sense to a man who simultaneously supported open occupancy and encouraged his congregation to leave the city for an all-white suburb. Countless Jewish institutions across the country made the same journey, many under the leadership of people who openly defended open occupancy and fair housing.

For Jewish leaders in Detroit, the fight for open occupancy had two effects. First, it confirmed their belief that only a large-scale policy-oriented campaign could save Jewish life in the city. A researcher studying the Bagley Community Council, who was an active member herself, reported that council members’ support for the open-occupancy cam- paign came on the heels of their growing sense of the “futility of confining activity to the Bagley area . . . [and solving] problems on a neighborhood basis.”54 Second, and rather contradictorily, the fight for open occupancy stoked a sense of cynicism about the city and its politics. After all, the reactionary Homeowner’s Rights Ordinance had passed. A sense of fatalism—the feeling that Detroit was a lost cause—only grew as Bagley Com- munity Council members strayed further from local neighborhood politics and attempted to reform larger urban policies.

Jews found it far more difficult to feel sanguine about reforming a whole city, let alone an entire system, than to feel hopeful about making a difference on a particular block. By 1964 Bagley residents reported growing skepticism with the community organization’s ability to save the neighborhood. Although empirically the neighborhood had changed only slightly in its racial composition over the past four years, residents interpreted the slow but steady increase of black families in the neighborhood (now 10 percent, up from 1–2 percent in 1962) as foreshadowing unwanted changes to come. Many homeowners continued to describe the neighborhood as a good place to live, but fewer answered affirmatively when surveyors asked if they would recommend it to friends, and many expressed

53 “Challenge to Conscience: Conclusions, Recommendations, Major Messages,” [1963], p. 12, folder 3, box 83 (Jewish Community Council Archives).

54 Wolf and Lebeaux, Change and Renewal in an Urban Community, 85.

Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond 515

concerns about safety and crime that they linked directly to the arrival of more black families.55

Jewish residents’ sense of impending doom was less about actual conditions in the neighborhood—home values appeared to be holding steady, and residents still believed that the local schools offered high-quality education. Instead, their sense of foreboding drew upon history. They were certain that without significant changes to housing policy or legislation, the same patterns of neighborhood and school decline and home deprecia- tion that they had already witnessed would continue because of the arrival of black fami- lies. By 1965 almost half of all the Jews in Detroit lived outside the city in the northwest suburbs.56 Yet from their outposts in the suburbs, many Jews continued to base their politics and identities on the city, lobbying for urban policies that they hoped could change the city’s longstanding racial patterns.

Urban Politics, Suburban Space

Well before the urban uprisings of 1967, Detroit Jews had created a remote urban poli- tics that could weather their move away from the city. At a meeting in January 1966, the Jewish Community Council’s newly formed Education and Housing Committee pledged to “work toward the establishment of quality education throughout the Metro- politan area whether or not there is a portion of the Jewish community in residence” and to “continue to utilize the resources of the Jewish community as a force to support these programs which stress quality education, open occupancy and education for living in integrated communities.”57 This statement was a far cry from issuing a demand that Jews inhabit integrated neighborhoods. Jewish leaders were instead speaking from a new polit- ical terrain fundamentally removed from neighborhood space: the suburbs.

Local neighborhood politics had given Jews a sense that there was larger meaning in whatever individual sacrifices they endured to stay in the neighborhood, and that sense of meaning was not easily replicable. Indeed, the politics of remote urban activism often took the form of a kind of abnegation of responsibility, a claim that the real problems existed outside of the Jewish purview and that the Jews could only lobby others for change. This logic imprinted itself on white liberalism more generally. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1963, Murray Friedman, a onetime socialist turned neoconservative, explained, “Liberal whites are . . . caught in the dilemma of believing in equal rights for Negroes . . . while at the same time attempting to escape from the real and fancied disad- vantages of desegregation.”58 For Jews, Friedman explained, the dilemma was even more intense because they found it very difficult to disengage from urban concerns, even after they had dismantled the lived space of Jewish urbanism. Yet one cannot dismiss Jews’ enduring investment in urbanism as the vestiges of white liberal guilt or a form of nostal- gia. Rather, Jews’ enduring connection to urbanism had real political consequences for Jews and their relationship to American civil society. Far from imagining themselves as

55 Ibid., 20–32. 56 Bolkosky, Harmony and Dissonance, 300. 57 Joint meeting of Neighborhoods and Education Committee minutes, Jan. 11, 1966, folder 8, box 590

(Jewish Community Council Archives). 58 Murray Friedman, “The White Liberal’s Retreat,” Atlantic Monthly, 21 (Jan. 1963), 43. On Jews and liber-

alism, see also Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (New York, 2005).

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blending seamlessly into white suburban life, American Jews worked to distinguish their politics and their identities from the suburban spaces they occupied.

The shift toward remote urban activism allowed Jews to leave the city and still believe that they were taking their city politics with them. In the aftermath of the 1967 riots, the Detroit Jewish News scrambled to document just how active Jews remained in urban affairs, and the Jewish Community Council formed an Urban Affairs Subcommittee charged with maintaining and publicizing the “real involvement of the Jewish Commu- nity” in city affairs through programs such as clothing drives, tutoring, and employment- training services.59 A concern for “neighborhood change,” once the catch phrase of Jewish efforts, gave way to a new commitment to solve the “urban crisis,” a phrase that appeared on the Jewish agenda only after 1967 and then with striking frequency. When the locus of Jewish concern had been the neighborhood, the stakes had been much more immediate; after all, the neighborhoods to which Jews directed their attention were the neighborhoods where Jews lived. In the climate of the perceived “urban crisis,” Jews’ investment was not in saving a particular space of the city—rather, their goal, more abstract yet also more ambitious than before, was to save the city. Since the early 1950s Jews had honed a form of political activism to take on this task, and the 1967 riots put their politics to a new test.

Jewish leaders studiously sought partners with liberal black leaders in the city and worked to enmesh these leaders into urban and suburban initiatives. Almost all of their formal coalitions with black leaders, whether in the city or the suburbs, were formed under the auspices of interfaith alliances with black liberal Protestant clergy. For example, Jewish leaders supported the creation of interfaith Suburban Action Centers that would engage with black leadership to educate suburbanites about city conditions and serve as nodes of support for city reform efforts. In the months after the riots, Jewish and black liberal clergy joined in interfaith efforts to disseminate “an interpretation of the riot” that neither vali- dated the “Radical Right” nor fanned the fires of black power politics. Along these lines, liberal Jewish leaders endorsed initiatives that black clergy proposed to add more blacks to the police force and limit the number of gun permits issued in white areas.60

Although leftist Jews such as the famed labor lawyer Ernest Goodman were commit- ted to defending black radical politics, most hoped to find a way to harness separatist, nationalist, and other forms of black radical politics to a liberal vision for the city and its reform. A 1968 report sponsored by the Interfaith Emergency Council noted that a “group of militant and moderate Afro-American leaders have met with a group convened by the American Jewish Congress for the purpose of formulating a developmental assis- tance program through the Jewish community.” For a time, Jews in Detroit, like other white and black middle-class liberals, attempted to salvage a strong liberal urban presence by placating black nationalists with financial support for some of their neighborhood

59 “Riot Victims Get Aid . . . ‘No Let-Down in Rebuilding Detroit,’” Detroit Jewish News, Aug. 11, 1967, p. 5; “Responses of Jewish Community Agencies and Organizations to the ‘Urban Crisis,’” May 7, 1968, folder 1, box 591 (Jewish Community Council Archives); Community Relations Council Urban Affairs Subcommittee minutes, Jan. 9, 1969, ibid.

60 Steering Committee, Interfaith Emergency Council minutes, Sept. 22, 1967, folder 6, box 29 (Richard C. Hertz Papers, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio). Interfaith Action Council, report, April 5, 1968, ibid.

Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond 517

initiatives. As the historian Heather Thompson explains, “if black faith could be restored, peace would return and liberal leadership would be secure.”61

Jews’ remote urbanism was premised upon a willed blindness to the structural critique increasingly embedded in black protest politics. For example, in the spring of 1969, several rabbis received notice of a “black manifesto” circulating that decried capitalism; blamed white religious groups, including Jews, for perpetuating societal inequity; and demanded from them monetary compensation for years of exploitation. Detroit’s Jewish Community Council urged rabbis not to “over-react” if individuals requested permission to read the manifesto in front of their congregations. The council explained that the manifesto revealed “a power struggle within the black community rather than a serious attempt to extract ‘reparations’ from religious institutions.” Summarily dismissing the manifesto, council leaders concluded, “This in no way affects our basic commitment and responsibilities and the validity of our involvement in urban problems.”62

Jews’ attachment to urbanism fueled their tendency to flatten the varieties of black politics and to dismiss black radicalism as either irrelevant or outlandish. Politically engaged Jews wanted to believe that their policy and legislative-oriented activism could reform the city without a major structural revolution. In the weeks and months following the riots, the Detroit Jewish News reported on African American leaders’ anti-Zionist statements and on black efforts to eject Jews from civil rights organizations. Characteriz- ing these activities as stemming from “black power controlling elements,” the editors of the paper berated black leaders for “weaken[ing] the force that are striving for unity in the ranks of the freedom loving people.” Black radicalism did not spring anew from the 1960s, nor was it univocal. Yet many Jewish leaders, alongside other liberals, hoped to marginalize radical voices and re-create a liberal urban center, even if Jews no longer inhabited the city. To be certain, other Jews perceived black radicalism as such a threat to Jewish security that they eschewed liberalism, characterizing it as pandering to radical forces. Still, one can see the pulsating power of urban reformist politics even in these Jews’ disavowal of liberalism. For example, a decidedly antiliberal, pro–Richard M. Nixon Jewish man served as a representative on New Detroit, a biracial committee of private citizens invested in rebuilding the city, and he joined with other wealthy Jews in bankrolling programs for the redevelopment of Detroit. These Jews clearly wanted to protect their material investments in the city, but they perceived their economic invest- ments in the city as inextricably tied to their ideological commitment to urban reform and sustainability.63

61 Arthur Cryns and Franklin Zweig, “To Change the Climate of Violence in Detroit: A Crisis-Oriented, Inter-University Training Institute as a Supportive and Consultative Arm to Community Efforts toward Tension Reduction, Racism Reform and Community Development in the Detroit Area,” draft manuscript, March 20, 1968, ibid. On Ernest Goodman’s defense of black radical politics, see Babson, Riddle, and Elsila, Color of Law, 366–443. Thompson, Whose Detroit?, 75, 87–100. On attempts by Jews to salvage a strong liberal urban presence in other U.S. cities, see Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadel- phia, 2006), 160–62; and Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York, 2011), 244.

62 Dubin (of Jewish Community Council) to Rabbis, May 22, 1969, memo, folder 10, box 31 (Hertz Papers). 63 “Irresponsible Bigots’ ‘Power’ Pressures,” Detroit Jewish News, Sept. 15, 1967, p. 4. On anti-Zionist state-

ments made by African American leaders, see also “ Attack on Zionism, Israel Branded ‘Anti-Semitic Tragedy,’ Affecting Race Relations in U.S.,” ibid., Aug. 18, 1967, p. 1. On black radicalism in the 1960s, see Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003), 217–20. On Jews and ties between urban economic investments and ideological commitments, see Peter Golden, Quiet Diplomat: A Biography of Max M. Fisher (New York, 1992).

518 The Journal of American History September 2012

As misguided as the effort by Jews to reform the city remotely may have been, this strategy also constituted a new form of Jewish urban activism. Most significantly, the city continued to exist in Jews’ consciousness as a place that mattered, even when Jews felt disillusioned and disappointed with it. By the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century, pockets of urban activists, many of whom were Jewish, insisted that a more grounded, local urban involvement replace the remote urban engagement of the past. In 2010 Quicken Loans moved its headquarters from Livonia, a suburb to the northwest of Detroit, to Detroit’s central business district. Dan Gilbert, the Jewish, Detroit- born chairman and founder of the company, led the way for other business ventures and foundations to invest in Detroit. David Carroll, a Quicken Loans vice president and also a Jewish native of Detroit, explained in 2012, “We are committed to transforming Detroit— from a shrinking, so called ‘rust belt’ city of high unemployment to a thriving commercial hotbed that is the envy of all.” For Gilbert, that commitment included purchasing cheap real estate in the downtown core and providing incentives for employees who chose to live in the city. The company also benefitted from substantial tax abatements and federal and state subsidies. Several other Jewish-led initiatives, including the Live Detroit Fund to sub- sidize rents sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, the revitalization of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue, and the creation of Moishe House, a communal living space for Jews in their twenties, targeted a small swathe of downtown Detroit as the foundation for a new cultural and technological corridor. Despite failing public schools, thousands of abandoned homes, astronomical unemployment rates, and rampant poverty, the corridor was envisioned to attract creative, affluent, predominantly white people to an approximately six-square-mile section of a 144-square-mile city. New development plans aside, Jews’ early twenty-first-century investments in the city replicated patterns to negotiate and remake urban space that had characterized their politics over the last six decades.64

Historians who think that urban politics of city dwellers were checked at the entrance ramps to the highways that led millions of Americans to the suburbs must reexamine their narrative. Well before most Jews left the city, they were already crafting a new form of politics that changed their relationship to the physical space of their lives. Local activ- ism mandated a grounded and individual-oriented attachment to the neighborhood and the city; remote policy politics offered a way to engage with urban issues from afar. Each form was flawed, and neither solved the problem of racial segregation. Nonetheless, urban flight must be understood as more complicated than a journey away from urban liberalism and toward white suburban conservatism. For many Americans, this formula- tion works, but for others it does not. If we are to understand American cities of the past and present, we must train our eyes on the expanses of American urbanism, well into the heart of the suburbs and, perhaps most recently, back into the city.

64 David Carroll, “Detroit Initiatives,” Jan. 23, 2012, report (in Berman’s possession); David Carroll telephone interview by Lila Corwin Berman, Feb. 22, 2012. On the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit’s Live Detroit, see http://www.livedetroitfund.org/; and Scott Kaufman ( of the Jewish Federation) telephone inter- view by Berman, March 22, 2012. On recent efforts by Jews in other cities to reinvest and reinhabit urban spaces, see “New Early Learning Experience Coming Soon to Center City,” Jewish Exponent, July 15, 2010, p. 18; Anthony Weiss, “On the Jersey Waterfront, Jews Return, but Jewish Community Still Struggles,” Jewish Daily Forward, April 24, 2009, p. 1; and Jill Jacobs, “Unlocked Gates: Steps toward a Jewish Urban Theology,” Tikkun, 21 ( July–Aug. 2006), 53–62. Present-day urban-focused Jewish organizations include Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, Bend the Arc (formerly Progressive Jewish Alliance and Jewish Funds for Justice), Jews United for Justice, Jewish Community Action, Avodah: The Jewish Service Corps, Jewish Organizing Initiative, Tikkun Ha-Ir, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Urban Adamah.

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© 2012 Organisation of American Historians