Jewish Life in the Industrial Promised Land, 1855-2005 by Nora Faires, Nancy Hanflik

Abstract

144 Michigan Historical Review school segregation as official policy. White supremacy was a fact of life throughout the North, leading to social inequalities that were often as severe as those in the South. The North also mirrored the South in that African Americans in both regions were ambivalent toward school desegregation. This is an understudied topic, and Douglas offers an important beginning toward understanding those blacks who opposed, or simply questioned, integrationist efforts. In many ways, however, the challenge to Jim Crow education charted a distinct course in the North. Northern attempts at reform often focused on state and local governments, and these efforts involved not only litigation but also extensive lobbying, boycotting, and protests?all of which would have been largely futile and prohibitively dangerous in the South during this period. Many northern states had statutes dating from the late nineteenth century prohibiting segregated schools. Douglas points to widespread defiance of these unambiguous antidiscrimination laws as an example of the ways in which legislation that runs counter to majority opinion and cultural norms can be made ineffective. Unlike the struggle in the South, the northern batde was not to change laws but to bring cultural and political norms into line with already existing laws so as to change social practices. The resolution of the battles against school segregation also played out much differendy in the North than in the South. Whereas the civ? rights movement eventually resulted in significant integration in the South, northern school desegregation largely faded. Demographic transformations?most notably the growth of black inner-city populations and "white flight"?led to increased segregation, even in the absence of official policies. This disheartening development makes for a fitting conclusion to a book that so powerfully challenges any comforting assumptions we might have had about race, regions, law, and the schools. Christopher W. Schmidt Dartmouth College Nora Faires and Nancy Hanflik. JewishUfe in the Industrial Promised Land, 1855-2005. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005. Pp. 240. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $29.95. Not so long ago, local Jewish community histories were disdained by scholars as parochial and filiopietistic. As the study of regional American Book Reviews 145 Jewish history has matured, however, local histories are appearing that while firmly anchored in the local setting keep the national context in clear view. Nora Faires and Nancy Hanflik's JewishUfe in the Industrial Promised Eand, 1855-2005 is a fine addition to this literature. Faires and Hanflik trace the rise?and precipitous decline?of the Jewish community of Flint, Michigan. In many ways, Flint shares the Jewish history of other industrial cities: settlement first by Central Europeans, then East Europeans; economic concentration first in retad, then increasingly in the professions; the development of communal organizations for a wide range of purposes and constituencies; and a sort of "Golden Age" of prosperity, fam?y growth, and communal strength in the booming 1950s. Jewish and civic fates were linked: Flint, as a center of auto production, was "the iconic city of postwar plenty" (p. xiv), and Look magazine chose a Flint fam?y for a 1955 profile of American Jews. Likewise, the story of the city's decline in the face of deindustrialization is the story of the decline of the Jewish community, which was heav?y concentrated in service sectors dependent on the local economy. In the last four decades of the twentieth century, Flint lost 40 percent of its overall population?and 55 percent of its Jews. This book is well written (although there are a few mistakes with respect to Jewish practices), and it is plentifully illustrated with intelligendy chosen photographs. The authors reached out to local Jews for research materials; more than one hundred people provided fam?y photographs and artifacts, and many gave personal interviews as weU. The authors aimed for "criticaUy informed subjectivity, blending 'insider' with 'outsider' knowledge" (p. 11), and they have done a good job of achieving this goal. Faires and Hanflik exhibit their concern for the community, wh?e not flinching from discussing antisemitism and other tensions and conflicts, both in the internal workings of the Jewish community and in the city as awhole. Faires and Hanflik's book is...