Books: Tale of a neighborhood

Historian Jeffrey Gurock delves into the rise, decline and revival of Jewish Harlem.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER

DECEMBER 22, 2016 17:39

The author, Jeffrey Gurock, poses for a photo in Harlem (photo credit: Courtesy) — The author, Jeffrey Gurock, poses for a photo in Harlem

(photo credit: Courtesy)

At the beginning of the 20th century, Edward Steiner described what it meant for a Jewish immigrant to make it in New York City: “From a presser the man become a cutter, then a designer, and at last opens a shop in Harlem, and his wife wears diamonds. Harlem is the goal and the further uptown he moves, the larger, one may be sure, is his bank account.”

Before it was celebrated as the home of the Harlem Renaissance (and a mecca for aficionados of literature, jazz and black culture), and long before it became a poverty and crime-ridden ghetto, Harlem was the second-largest Jewish neighborhood in the United States (surpassed only by the Lower East Side), a conglomeration of tenements, brownstones and upscale apartments.

In The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community, Jeffrey Gurock, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University, updates his book, When Harlem was Jewish, 1870-1930, which was published in 1978. Gurock follows several generations of German, Eastern European and Sephardi Jews in, out of, and (recently) back into Harlem. Reviewing the institutions they built and the debates they had about Americanization, religious practices and relationships with African Americans, The Jews of Harlem is an evocative account of an oft-forgotten component of the history of an iconic neighborhood.

Like their counterparts throughout the United States, the Jews of Harlem, Gurock reminds us, were concerned that the younger generation, in its zeal to Americanize, was alienated from the old ways and less and less interested in Judaism’s principles and practices. Most of the models they designed to harmonize contemporary mores with Jewish traditions, however, did not “retrieve” many young people (who felt no nostalgia for a European past that was discussed during and after services in storefront shuls) and were anathema to the Orthodox.

Offering classes taught in English, a modern curriculum and a breakfast program for poor Jewish kids, the schools of the United Talmud Torah (UTT), for example, enrolled about 1,700 children at its peak in 1912. About 8,000 neighborhood people used the institution’s cultural, social and athletic facilities, but the UTT could not compete with New York City’s fabled public schools.

Harlem’s Orthodox Jews were outraged by the policies of the UTT. They beat back attempts to substitute Friday night and Saturday afternoon services with a sermon in English for classes in Hebrew. They opposed placing a piano in the children’s synagogue, even if it was not used during Sabbath services. Vandals ripped out the wires of a stereopticon machine (the forerunner of a slide projector), purchased as a visual aid for classes in Jewish history, because it violated the prohibition on creating “graven images” of the Almighty.

Other institutions, most notably the YMHA, the YWHA and the Institutional Synagogue, Gurock reports, also failed to get those who came to play to stay and pray. More often than not, he writes, as they walked the streets of Harlem, Jews remained much less in touch with their religious tradition than with one another.

Gurock also documents the mass exodus of Jews from Harlem. A population that had crested at 175,000 in 1921 was reduced to fewer than 25,000 in 1930. He maintains that economic mobility and better housing options, enhanced by the opening of rapid transit lines in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, pulled them away “more than the arrival of large numbers of African Americans into the deteriorating neighborhood pushed them out,” and legislation virtually eliminating immigration from Eastern Europe meant that newcomers would not replace them.

It seems clear, however, that these developments were mutually reinforcing.

Gurock may also underestimate tensions in the ensuing decades between blacks and the Jewish landlords and storekeepers who remained in Harlem. He maintains, for example, that neither the Harlem rioters nor the commentators who defended them suggested that attacks were aimed specifically at Jews. He acknowledges, however, that in the ’50s the NAACP launched a campaign against liquor stores in Harlem, most of them owned by Jews, allegedly closed to Negro salesmen; that in 1964 Malcolm X compared Jewish businessmen to “colonists... intent on exploiting the black community”; that black parents were pitted against the largely Jewish United Federation of Teachers in the New York City “school wars” of the 1960s; and that inter-group tensions did not abate in the 1970s.

In the 1990s and 2000s, a few thousand Jews, along with affluent members of other ethnic groups, moved to a gentrified Harlem. Welcomed by some, the transformation of the neighborhood has also stimulated criticism that the “interlopers” were displacing “the indigenous people,” driving up real estate prices, and garnering city services that had long been denied to blacks.

That aside, Gurock concludes that it is too early to tell whether uptown “will witness a second heyday” for New York Jews.

The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.