| Chapter 4.4: Jews | |
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Chapters
1. Symbolism, Self and Urban Environment
2. Self Selection and Urban Decay
3. Woodland to City Neighborhood: 300 Years of Change
4. Invasion and Succession
5. Micrological Aspects of Urban Problems
6. Stigma and Self-Image in the Inner City |
The Irish, Italian and other middle-class Catholics who managed to slip into the Manor slowly over the years became part of the community's social fabric, as all invaders eventually do. The Catholic achievers and their more established Protestant neighÂbors in the manor became disturbed in the 1930s when large numbers of middle-class Jewish achievers started moving toward the Lefferts Manor from other parts of Brooklyn and New York City. The geographic route to the Manor by middle-class Jews is almost identical to that taken by blacks thirty years later: from Manhattan, to Bedford-Stuyvesant, to Crown Heights, and then to Flatbush. The desire of socially mobile Jews to move to residential settings that reflected their personal accomplishments is best exemplified by the following discussion from Gerald Green's classic, The Last Angry Man. In this selection, Dr. Sam Abelman tries to explain to his family why he wants to buy a particular house. The street he speaks of, incidentally, is in a residential section of Crown Heights which has attached to it great historical and symbolic notability. It is also only seven blocks north of the Lefferts Manor.
"So you bought a house, did you?" Sarah asked. "Which one, the seventeen-room mansion on Crown Street that needed four thousand dollars worth of repair? Or the one on Union Street where the roof leaked? What lemon did Dannenfelser unload on you, realty expert?" Some of the Jewish pioneers who moved into the Manor in the 1930s and 1940s tell of open and more veiled anti-Semitism directed toward them by established Manorites. one person interviewed told a story that well represents upper-middle-class "respectable" bigotry practices. It is necessary for ethnic scholars to realize that respectable people do not use common methods to put people in their places. America's Manorites do not stone people, burn crosses, or fire-bomb houses. However, because genteel citizens do not participate in the ordinary repertoire of expressing prejudice, this does not mean that they are less demented than their working-class cousins. The Jewish pioneer spoke of an incident which took place in 1950, and involved her seven year old daughter. Occasionally, the child played with a Gentile neighbor's daughter. One day her child came home to say that she had been invited to her friend's birthday party. As the parents of the children were not on speaking terms, the invitation was never formally confirmed. On the afternoon of the party, the little girl was prettily dressed by her mother and hesitantly sent off to the party with a gift for her friend. When she arrived at the door, she was politely refused entry by the maid, and came home to her mother in tears. Examples such as this, of ethnic, racial and religious discrimination in Manor social life are often repeated by the invaders with whom I spoke. The only major changes in scripts are the respective ethnic, racial and religious identities of the "victims" and "villains."
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