// essays //
May 18, 2015 (original post 04/02/2015)
Race and the Rabbis:
The White Jew and the Segregation of the American City
Avinoam Stillman
Hey, you know something people? I'm not black, but there's a whole lots a times I wish I could say I'm not white.
–Frank Zappa, “Trouble Every Day”
–Frank Zappa, “Trouble Every Day”
My great-grandfather, who is my namesake, was born in Lithuania and raised in Harlem. Around the turn of the century, immigrants, especially Eastern European Jews, gravitated towards urban neighborhoods like New York’s Harlem and the Lower East Side. Particularly after the end of World War II, many urban neighborhoods saw great population changes: residents became acculturated enough, and wealthy enough, to pursue the post-war American dream of suburban living. Many urban Jewish communities dwindled and disappeared; synagogues were sold, often converted (no pun intended) into churches. Across America’s cities, scattered surnames on storefronts are often all that remain of former Jewish owners. Growing up in Boston’s Jewish community, I remember the annual pilgrimage from the suburbs to Dorchester and Roxbury, down Blue Hill (formerly “Jew Hill”) Avenue, for Tisha B’Av, the Jewish day of communal mourning. The gesture of visiting the “old neighborhood” on the day of memorial for the myriad catastrophes of Jewish history indicates the feeling of exile that, for some, accompanied the mass departure of Jews. Nostalgia aside, the Jewish move to the suburbs directly fed the creation of the suburban Jewish culture and religion captured in, for example, the Coen Brothers’ film “A Serious Man.” For many, the transition from immigrant to American (and as we’ll see, from Jew to White) accompanied the move from city to suburb.
This transformative story of Jewish social mobility and urban communal decay has another side: the perspective of the African Americans who populated the urban neighborhoods abandoned in “white flight.” European immigrant groups for a time shared their neighborhoods with African Americans, as the latter increasingly moved to urban centers in the 20th century. But practices such as blockbusting, in which unscrupulous realtors convinced white residents to sell their homes at a loss by leveraging the “threat” of racial integration, exploited discriminatory attitudes for economic gain. African American families were often overcharged for their new homes, and redlining, the denial of equal services to African American neighborhoods, solidified the segregation that remains endemic in America’s cities. With geographic segregation often comes cultural segregation, which persists in the apathy of many white Americans to African American populations. Jewish Americans largely exist in the public image as ethnically white, and often participate in this indifference. Many Jewish Americans, particularly among the Orthodox, would probably be perplexed as to why a connection with African American communities would even be desirable. (By “Orthodox” I refer less to religious commitments and more to the insular socio-cultural space created in Orthodox communities.) But with the prominence of the “Black Lives Matter” movement on the national stage, and subsequent discussions about the “whiteness” and “privilege” of American Jews, an appraisal of Orthodox-Black race relations seems to be in order. Ideologies of Orthodoxy, in keeping with Jewish law, halacha, usually include strongly ethnic aspects, including the transference of Jewishness through matrilineal descent and the creation of self-contained communities. While this awareness of religious and ethnic difference has tended toward insularity, I wonder if it could not also foster solidarity with other minority groups. To that end, a series of rabbinic responsa from the late 1960s addressing the segregation of neighborhoods and the Jewish part in “white flight” may provoke thoughts about what it would mean for Orthodox Jews to engage sensitively with African Americans.
In 1968, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, published a rabbinic responsum in HaPardes, the official journal of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America. In it, he addressed the halachic concerns surrounding Jews selling their homes to Gentiles. Beyond the halachic minutiae, Schneerson feared that by leaving traditional neighborhoods Jews might contribute to the closing of synagogues and charitable institutions, and to a general destabilization of community. Schneerson even implies that Jews who have already left to the suburbs have a religious duty to move back to their old neighborhoods. In the subsequent issue of HaPardes, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a resident of the Lower East Side and the preeminent legal decisor in the Orthodox community, published a letter endorsing the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s responsum. Two of the most prominent rabbis in the United States — and in the world — voiced strong opposition to the Jewish abandonment of urban neighborhoods. But the damage was already done: flight to the suburbs continued, and with it the destabilization of urban Orthodox life and racial segregation.
Schneerson and Feinstein’s responsa are ambivalent about integration. On the one hand they are not enthusiastic about it, mostly because they value homogeneity in “Jewish neighborhoods.” On the other hand, they are even less enthused about Jews leaving preexisting communities, even if those communities are becoming integrated. While tracking the emergence of Jews into the category of whiteness is tricky, there seems to be a discrepancy between the way the rabbis viewed the Jewish community and the way some urban Jews viewed themselves. For Schneerson and Feinstein, integration probably wouldn’t refer to white and black populations mingling; they don’t even mention African Americans specifically. They are more generally concerned with communal destabilization caused by the integration of Jews and Gentiles. For the many Jewish families that followed their white neighbors to the suburbs, however, aligning themselves with whiteness must have seemed the ideal way to move ahead in society. The mere inclusion of Jews in a term like “white flight” implies that the whitening of Jews had begun — that the geographic movement of Jews might correlate with an ethnic shift.
In the October 1969 issue of HaPardes, Rabbi Simcha Elberg published an editorial defending the responsa of Rabbis Schneerson and Feinstein. Ehlberg, the editor of HaPardes, poses a question to his rabbinic readership: “How could Jews flee en masse from specific neighborhoods and evidence before everyone their hateful relationship to an ethnic element that is frequently justified in its claims?” He invites his readers to “describe to ourselves: What would we think about those who would act towards us in this manner? Wouldn’t our hearts fill with resentment and insult? And if we — a nation inwardly filled with love for all those created in God’s image, and who don’t hold hatred against any nation in the world, whose whole character is to bring kindness and love to all — would be resentful if others were disgusted by us and distanced themselves from our vicinity — what will these colored people say? Why can’t we understand the feelings of these Gentiles when we flee from living with them in one neighborhood?”
When I first read Ehlberg’s piece, I was struck by his sensitivity and ability to empathize with African American feelings of discrimination and oppression. Here was a prominent Orthodox voice taking an internal stand against segregation, championing the justice of African American claims to his fellow scholars. Furthermore, Ehlberg is attuned to the need to tolerate diverse groups in “the ethnic composite” of America. The idea of being “filled with love for all those created in God’s image” is as strong a religious approval of human rights and equality as one could wish for.
Subsequent readings, however, have complicated my initial impression. Ehlberg feared that unwillingness to share neighborhoods with African Americans would be liable to “create pretexts and new precedents for hatred of Israel.” Here again, as for Schneerson and Feinstein, the ethnic binary is primarily Jew/Gentile, not white/black. Simply because they are non-Jews, African Americans are in Ehlberg’s view susceptible to anti-Semitism, and are expected to (justifiably) take offense at the reluctance of Jews to share their neighborhoods. This is the crux of the tension: are Jews supposed to respect African American rights and dignities because of their intrinsic value, or out of fear of retribution? Ehlberg affirms both reasons: genuine sympathy for the continuing unjust treatment of African Americans coexists with the fear of fanning anti-Semitism. Ehlberg here makes a radical claim: Jewish indifference to the oppression of others may itself catalyze (latent) anti-Semitism. Again, Ehlberg implicitly assumes that most, if not all, Gentiles are prone to anti-Semitism. Regardless of the validity of this impression, he shows sensitivity to the dynamics of intolerance, of whatever variety, in which one prejudice — racial bias — can feed another — anti-Semitism.
Still, for all his empathy for the humiliating effects of segregation, Ehlberg’s discourse is firmly situated in the Orthodox rabbinic context of HaPardes. He only mentions African Americans elliptically — they are “a certain population,” “these people,” or most explicitly, “colored people,” using an ambiguous Hebrew term (bnei ha’tishḥoret) which also connotes “youths.” His unwillingness to openly identify African Americans is partially attributable to the conventions of rabbinic Hebrew, but also betrays a wariness of dealing with social concerns in a rabbinic forum. The title of Ehlberg’s editorial — “A Halachic, not a Political, Problem” — hides from social or “political” problems in the shelter of halacha. As a product of the Talmudically analytic Lithuanian yeshiva world, halacha is Ehlberg’s lens through which to view the world, and he spurns the label “political.” He also professes the inherent morality of the Jewish people, “whose whole character is to bring kindness and love to all,” as a motivation for his social sensitivity. Ehlberg’s rhetoric is organic to particularly Jewish literary and legal culture, and this may have contributed to its impotency on a large scale. The idea that a responsum in a rabbinic journal could affect the social and racial consciousness of masses of assimilating Jewish Americans seems, in retrospect, ludicrous. The opportunity to stop “white flight” was likely a lost cause even in Ehlberg’s time. The contemporary question for Orthodox Jews who want to act upon Ehlberg’s inspiration is whether there can be an approach that grows from Jewish sources while still being comprehensible to others inside and outside the Jewish world.
To speak with the Other demands a shared language. Franz Rosenzweig famously said that all speech is translation. Moving from different conceptual lexicons is also a kind of translation, one that is sorely lacking in the scant conversation between Orthodox Jews and African Americans. Whether or not that “Rosetta Stone” will be found, I can’t say; but I know that the position of Jews in the “ethnic composite” of America will be shaped by its presence or its lack. To adopt a Yiddish idiom, I would say that Orthodox racial discourse needs to be “farteitched un farbessered" — translated and improved. That is, Orthodox Jews have to change the way they say what they say, so that they communicate a message with meaning to the rest of American society. But even with clear and sensitive statements, the Orthodox still wouldn’t concretely bridge the gap that even the best translation leaves. That may depend on actions more than words, whether that means marching in the streets or teaching in public schools. In New York, the main populations of Jews who still live nearby African Americans are the often Hasidic and Haredi residents of Brooklyn. This proximity has produced violence, as in the Crown Heights Riots of the 1990s which, sparked when the aforementioned Lubavitcher Rebbe’s motorcade accidentally killed one African American child and injured another, resulted in several days of rioting and attacks on Jewish residents. But even today, with lower tensions, improving relationships between Orthodox Jews and African Americans is still valuable. Ehlberg’s editorial points both to practical and ideal reasons for amicability, whether it is just to reduce instances of racist or anti-Semitic incidents on both sides, or, more radically, to foster solidarity between these two New York minorities. John Zorn, a figure without any cachet in the Orthodox community, once said about his Jewish identity that “I don’t think that passing for white is the best way to survive in this culture.” Orthodox Jews have certainly internalized their difference from mainstream American culture. While it seems unlikely, it is intriguing to imagine whether that sense of difference could allow, or even nurture, empathy with other minorities.
This transformative story of Jewish social mobility and urban communal decay has another side: the perspective of the African Americans who populated the urban neighborhoods abandoned in “white flight.” European immigrant groups for a time shared their neighborhoods with African Americans, as the latter increasingly moved to urban centers in the 20th century. But practices such as blockbusting, in which unscrupulous realtors convinced white residents to sell their homes at a loss by leveraging the “threat” of racial integration, exploited discriminatory attitudes for economic gain. African American families were often overcharged for their new homes, and redlining, the denial of equal services to African American neighborhoods, solidified the segregation that remains endemic in America’s cities. With geographic segregation often comes cultural segregation, which persists in the apathy of many white Americans to African American populations. Jewish Americans largely exist in the public image as ethnically white, and often participate in this indifference. Many Jewish Americans, particularly among the Orthodox, would probably be perplexed as to why a connection with African American communities would even be desirable. (By “Orthodox” I refer less to religious commitments and more to the insular socio-cultural space created in Orthodox communities.) But with the prominence of the “Black Lives Matter” movement on the national stage, and subsequent discussions about the “whiteness” and “privilege” of American Jews, an appraisal of Orthodox-Black race relations seems to be in order. Ideologies of Orthodoxy, in keeping with Jewish law, halacha, usually include strongly ethnic aspects, including the transference of Jewishness through matrilineal descent and the creation of self-contained communities. While this awareness of religious and ethnic difference has tended toward insularity, I wonder if it could not also foster solidarity with other minority groups. To that end, a series of rabbinic responsa from the late 1960s addressing the segregation of neighborhoods and the Jewish part in “white flight” may provoke thoughts about what it would mean for Orthodox Jews to engage sensitively with African Americans.
In 1968, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, published a rabbinic responsum in HaPardes, the official journal of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America. In it, he addressed the halachic concerns surrounding Jews selling their homes to Gentiles. Beyond the halachic minutiae, Schneerson feared that by leaving traditional neighborhoods Jews might contribute to the closing of synagogues and charitable institutions, and to a general destabilization of community. Schneerson even implies that Jews who have already left to the suburbs have a religious duty to move back to their old neighborhoods. In the subsequent issue of HaPardes, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a resident of the Lower East Side and the preeminent legal decisor in the Orthodox community, published a letter endorsing the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s responsum. Two of the most prominent rabbis in the United States — and in the world — voiced strong opposition to the Jewish abandonment of urban neighborhoods. But the damage was already done: flight to the suburbs continued, and with it the destabilization of urban Orthodox life and racial segregation.
Schneerson and Feinstein’s responsa are ambivalent about integration. On the one hand they are not enthusiastic about it, mostly because they value homogeneity in “Jewish neighborhoods.” On the other hand, they are even less enthused about Jews leaving preexisting communities, even if those communities are becoming integrated. While tracking the emergence of Jews into the category of whiteness is tricky, there seems to be a discrepancy between the way the rabbis viewed the Jewish community and the way some urban Jews viewed themselves. For Schneerson and Feinstein, integration probably wouldn’t refer to white and black populations mingling; they don’t even mention African Americans specifically. They are more generally concerned with communal destabilization caused by the integration of Jews and Gentiles. For the many Jewish families that followed their white neighbors to the suburbs, however, aligning themselves with whiteness must have seemed the ideal way to move ahead in society. The mere inclusion of Jews in a term like “white flight” implies that the whitening of Jews had begun — that the geographic movement of Jews might correlate with an ethnic shift.
In the October 1969 issue of HaPardes, Rabbi Simcha Elberg published an editorial defending the responsa of Rabbis Schneerson and Feinstein. Ehlberg, the editor of HaPardes, poses a question to his rabbinic readership: “How could Jews flee en masse from specific neighborhoods and evidence before everyone their hateful relationship to an ethnic element that is frequently justified in its claims?” He invites his readers to “describe to ourselves: What would we think about those who would act towards us in this manner? Wouldn’t our hearts fill with resentment and insult? And if we — a nation inwardly filled with love for all those created in God’s image, and who don’t hold hatred against any nation in the world, whose whole character is to bring kindness and love to all — would be resentful if others were disgusted by us and distanced themselves from our vicinity — what will these colored people say? Why can’t we understand the feelings of these Gentiles when we flee from living with them in one neighborhood?”
When I first read Ehlberg’s piece, I was struck by his sensitivity and ability to empathize with African American feelings of discrimination and oppression. Here was a prominent Orthodox voice taking an internal stand against segregation, championing the justice of African American claims to his fellow scholars. Furthermore, Ehlberg is attuned to the need to tolerate diverse groups in “the ethnic composite” of America. The idea of being “filled with love for all those created in God’s image” is as strong a religious approval of human rights and equality as one could wish for.
Subsequent readings, however, have complicated my initial impression. Ehlberg feared that unwillingness to share neighborhoods with African Americans would be liable to “create pretexts and new precedents for hatred of Israel.” Here again, as for Schneerson and Feinstein, the ethnic binary is primarily Jew/Gentile, not white/black. Simply because they are non-Jews, African Americans are in Ehlberg’s view susceptible to anti-Semitism, and are expected to (justifiably) take offense at the reluctance of Jews to share their neighborhoods. This is the crux of the tension: are Jews supposed to respect African American rights and dignities because of their intrinsic value, or out of fear of retribution? Ehlberg affirms both reasons: genuine sympathy for the continuing unjust treatment of African Americans coexists with the fear of fanning anti-Semitism. Ehlberg here makes a radical claim: Jewish indifference to the oppression of others may itself catalyze (latent) anti-Semitism. Again, Ehlberg implicitly assumes that most, if not all, Gentiles are prone to anti-Semitism. Regardless of the validity of this impression, he shows sensitivity to the dynamics of intolerance, of whatever variety, in which one prejudice — racial bias — can feed another — anti-Semitism.
Still, for all his empathy for the humiliating effects of segregation, Ehlberg’s discourse is firmly situated in the Orthodox rabbinic context of HaPardes. He only mentions African Americans elliptically — they are “a certain population,” “these people,” or most explicitly, “colored people,” using an ambiguous Hebrew term (bnei ha’tishḥoret) which also connotes “youths.” His unwillingness to openly identify African Americans is partially attributable to the conventions of rabbinic Hebrew, but also betrays a wariness of dealing with social concerns in a rabbinic forum. The title of Ehlberg’s editorial — “A Halachic, not a Political, Problem” — hides from social or “political” problems in the shelter of halacha. As a product of the Talmudically analytic Lithuanian yeshiva world, halacha is Ehlberg’s lens through which to view the world, and he spurns the label “political.” He also professes the inherent morality of the Jewish people, “whose whole character is to bring kindness and love to all,” as a motivation for his social sensitivity. Ehlberg’s rhetoric is organic to particularly Jewish literary and legal culture, and this may have contributed to its impotency on a large scale. The idea that a responsum in a rabbinic journal could affect the social and racial consciousness of masses of assimilating Jewish Americans seems, in retrospect, ludicrous. The opportunity to stop “white flight” was likely a lost cause even in Ehlberg’s time. The contemporary question for Orthodox Jews who want to act upon Ehlberg’s inspiration is whether there can be an approach that grows from Jewish sources while still being comprehensible to others inside and outside the Jewish world.
To speak with the Other demands a shared language. Franz Rosenzweig famously said that all speech is translation. Moving from different conceptual lexicons is also a kind of translation, one that is sorely lacking in the scant conversation between Orthodox Jews and African Americans. Whether or not that “Rosetta Stone” will be found, I can’t say; but I know that the position of Jews in the “ethnic composite” of America will be shaped by its presence or its lack. To adopt a Yiddish idiom, I would say that Orthodox racial discourse needs to be “farteitched un farbessered" — translated and improved. That is, Orthodox Jews have to change the way they say what they say, so that they communicate a message with meaning to the rest of American society. But even with clear and sensitive statements, the Orthodox still wouldn’t concretely bridge the gap that even the best translation leaves. That may depend on actions more than words, whether that means marching in the streets or teaching in public schools. In New York, the main populations of Jews who still live nearby African Americans are the often Hasidic and Haredi residents of Brooklyn. This proximity has produced violence, as in the Crown Heights Riots of the 1990s which, sparked when the aforementioned Lubavitcher Rebbe’s motorcade accidentally killed one African American child and injured another, resulted in several days of rioting and attacks on Jewish residents. But even today, with lower tensions, improving relationships between Orthodox Jews and African Americans is still valuable. Ehlberg’s editorial points both to practical and ideal reasons for amicability, whether it is just to reduce instances of racist or anti-Semitic incidents on both sides, or, more radically, to foster solidarity between these two New York minorities. John Zorn, a figure without any cachet in the Orthodox community, once said about his Jewish identity that “I don’t think that passing for white is the best way to survive in this culture.” Orthodox Jews have certainly internalized their difference from mainstream American culture. While it seems unlikely, it is intriguing to imagine whether that sense of difference could allow, or even nurture, empathy with other minorities.
// AVINOAM STILLMAN is a sophomore in Columbia College. He can be reached at [email protected]. Photo courtesy of KCET.org.