Who Killed Jewish Boston?
DRAPER, ROGER
WHO KILLED JEWISH BOSTON? BY ROGER DRAPER During the spring of 1987 a remarkable letter appeared in a trade publication called the Metropolitan Real Estate Journal. Written by an anonymous...
...A coalition of 22 Boston thrift institutions proceeded to announce a $29 million pool of FHA-backed loan funds available to persons seeking to purchase houses there...
...this cannot fail to affect our choice of neighborhoods, dining habits, and, especially, of marriage partners...
...As I should perhaps note here, I am myself the kind of person who killed Jewish Boston...
...Your people let this synagogue slip into disgrace [she, too, has since abandoned it], and now you want money from us...
...She didn't...
...much as I suspect they might like to...
...The Death of an American Jewish Community is a careless book, full of slips and errors...
...Yet Lewis and the thugs supplementing her efforts were mere scavengers...
...Black neighbors were hostile...
...Eventually, Levine and Harmon report, the Lubavitchers "began to wonder if it would be just the same to the Messiah if they awaited his return in the suburbs...
...Brookline and Newton are standard Northeastern suburbs inhabited by standard Northeastern Americans, a lot of whom happen to be Jews...
...Intimidating messages were directed at Jews...
...The most fundamental questions raised by The Death of an American Jewish Community concern the meaning and requirements of Jewishness, not relations between Jews and blacks...
...As a result, no one else did either...
...If the Jewish leadership hadn't given it to her, she would never have succeeded...
...By the mid-'70s, though, most had departed, mainly to Brookline and Newton...
...Levine and Harmon resent people like me...
...Not long afterward, the congregation was moved to Newton...
...the building was sold to the Lubavitcher Hasidim...
...What the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group did not say was that these resources were to be limited to blacks buying property in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, the only white areas where they were tolerated...
...Some of them formed a criminal underclass and began to prey upon Jews and middle-class blacks alike...
...In order to sell houses to blacks they first had to acquire them from their Jewish owners...
...How many of them, do you suppose, want to live in ethnic neighborhoods...
...Wewere," he said, "having fun...
...The Jewish character of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan had fortified the Jewishness of their inhabitants...
...Much less defensibly, they made no attempt to stop the commercial sleaze and virtual terrorism that hastened it...
...He also told of housebreaks "arranged onlyto scare people...
...You owe us tins building...
...and would have, in the end, even if there had been no accomplices...
...Levine, a professor of sociology and religion at Boston University, and Harmon, a local journalist, contend that Jewish Boston could have been saved and, simultaneously, integrated...
...In 1968 many of thecity's Jews wished to stay put, and this indicated that they, unlike practically everyone else in Boston, would accept gradual integration...
...But their depredations, as the authors conclusively demonstrate, were set in motion by other outsiders: the banks and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA...
...Be that as it may, her behavior, which Levine and Harmon do not criticize specifically, amounted to a sort of moral extortion...
...Over half of all American Jews married in recent years took Christian spouses...
...that Jewish Boston was killed chiefly by bureaucrats, bankers and brokers...
...even in the mid-'60s, as manyas40,000were hanging on...
...With every generation we come more closely to resemble our Christian contemporaries, and vice versa...
...As for Shubow, he "had little concern for the Jewish stake in inner-city neighborhoods," say the authors (who characteristically do not indicate whether he admitted this to them in their interview or they inferred it...
...Blacks blame Jews...
...They believe, I suspect correctly, that a Jewish life must be led in a Jewish milieu...
...The FHA guarantee explains the willingness of the banks, and therefore the blockbusters, to deal with poor clients whose prospects of repayment were low...
...There is antiSemitism in America, particularly in Boston, but not enough of it to keep most Jews on the reservation...
...Jewish Boston was mainly killed by the Jews who freely abandoned it from the '50s to the mid-'60s...
...Put the temple in the hands of the black community or we'll burn it down with Jews init...
...By the outset of the '60s, the area around Mishkan Tefila was 71 per cent black and the congregation they formed was having difficulty attracting members...
...Jewish leaders, regarding suburbanization as inevitable and desirable, indeed did nothing to stop it...
...The reference to the Messiah's "return" must be a slip...
...to say nothing of omissions: We never learn, for example, when or why Elma Lewis abandoned Mishkan Tefila, and even the fact that she did so emerges only in a photo caption...
...The truth is that it had been weakened grievously long before they entered the picture...
...One such force was the blockbusters...
...the authors give both dates...
...Years later" the council's director, Robert Segal, confessed (apparently to the authors) that "the relocation of poor blacks into Jewish neighborhoods had never been perceived [by him] as a Jewish issue...
...The two of them set their sights on Mishkan Tefila, but they had difficulty negotiating with the Lubavitchers...
...The authors may be right in arguing that the bulk of the Jews still living in Boston had no desire to move in 1968...
...Our liberal society killed Jewish Boston...
...She refused...
...Your people turned and ran from this neighborhood...
...As Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon show in The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions (Free Press, 370 pp., $24.95), many of the realtors' black clients were poor...
...In 1962 my family freely departed what was then the Jewish neighborhood of Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, the scene of the past summer's anti-Semitic riots...
...In 1968, the FHA decided, for the first time, to guarantee real-estate loans in the inner city...
...But the pace speeded up radically in 1968 as realty firms, preparing to manipulate new government programs intended to make it easier for black people to buy homes, converged upon the area...
...In their view, strangely, the abandonment of the old temple "created cataclysmic change" because thereafter "The younger, wealthier, more upwardly mobile, and generally less traditional of Roxbury's Jews followed" (as if that had not already been happening...
...Jews blame blacks...
...The loss of population reflected, at bottom, something more fundamental: a loss of the will to lead a Jewish life markedly different from the lives of other Americans...
...Middle-class Jews had begun to leave the old neighborhood in the 1950s, and blacks had been replacing them...
...There were constant, often violent eruptions of black anti-Semitism...
...Moreover, the authors' standpoint is muddled: Emphasizing the destructive impact of voluntary emigration from Jewish Boston, as they do, is hard to reconcile with their conviction that it could have been saved...
...Fires started breaking out at the synagogue...
...Lewis found them "crazy as bedbugs...
...Levine and Harmon build a formidable case against the FHA andthethrifts...
...But the authors do not explicitly claim...
...When necessary, however, he was not above asking, "How would you like it if they rape your daughter and you've got a mulatto grandchild...
...In the early '50s, upward of 90,000 Jews lived in the Jewish district...
...According to the authors, the Jewish leaders "did not believe the threats were emanating from anyone involved with Elma Lewis...
...The authors disagree...
...Without exculpating either, Levine and Harmon point to "elusive forces external to the black and Jewish communities...
...Emancipation can have no other consequence...
...Consider the fate of a Roxbury synagogue...
...In 1954 or '58...
...Mishkan Tefila was Boston's leading Conservative temple...
...But is this what people wanted...
...Why, then, was it not achieved...
...For them, by and large, the ideal of a Jewish neighborhood is dead...
...Boston's Jewish Community Council nonetheless undertook to arrange the temple's transfer...
...For a substantial number, this was no mere change of locale...
...With a steady supply of incidents to exploit, the blockbusters had their way...
...So too is the dream, common to many Jews and blacks, of creating a mixed neighborhood...
...From the trustees' standpoint, they were merely responding to an accomplished fact...
...Yet by the beginning of the '50s half of the families belonging to it lived in the suburbs...
...Although a majority of those receiving loans under the program were evicted within five years, the banks profited...
...Often, wrote the broker, it was enough to tell a target that because so many blacks had already moved in, "property values are going down...
...Nonetheless, theyounger and better of f men and women who started the exodus in the previous decade, and were continuing to leave, represented the long-term trend: In the mid-'60s, 40percentof the Jewish population of Dorchester and Mattapan was older than 50...
...you're going to get a thousand dollars less next month...
...Segal thought Elma Lewis should try to raise some of the wherewithal to purchase Mishkan Tefila among blacks...
...And we're not paying a dime...
...Written by an anonymous broker, it described a blockbusting campaign that almost 20 years earlier had transformed Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, then the heart of Jewish Boston...
...The suburbanites followed their historical destiny...
...If half of the congregation had not forsaken the city after World War II, if the board had not unloaded the old building, and if the remaining middle-class members had not packed up thereafter, Lewis would never have tried to get her hands on Mishkan Tefila...
...In 1967 the building came to the attention of Lawrence Shubow, a liberal Jewish lawyer from Newton, and one of his clients, Elma Lewis, a black fine arts teacher trying to find a home for her black cultural center...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
