Neighborhood stabilization in jewish communities: A comparative analysis

Abstract

Since the 1920s and 1930s social scientists have noted the tendency for black residential areas to expand into and through Jewish communities rather than through other white ethnic communities (Kain, 1970; Rose, 1969; Sobel and Sobel, 1966). They have attributed the susceptibility of Jewish communities to racial change to the upward social mobility among Jews, to assimilation (i.e., the adoption of societal values emphasizing the suburban way of life), to Jewish family structure (i.e., the tendency for Jewish children to avoid living in the same neighborhoods as their parents), to the lack of commit ment among Jews to the physical environment (Sklare, 1972) and to the fact that Jews have never physically resisted black in-migration.1 Usually, synagogues and other Jewish communal institutions have pas sively adapted to changes in the community by relocating to newer Jewish communities in the suburbs. One problem with this strategy is the costs incurred for replacing synagogues and other communal facilities. In addi tion, the neighborhood transition process is never complete. The poor and the elderly are left behind in neighborhoods experiencing physical decline and rapid increases in the incidence of violent street crime (Ginsberg, 1975). Finally, the suburbanized Jewish population may become so dispersed as to make reestablishment of institutions inefficient or impossible. Jewish communal leaders have become increasingly aware of these prob lems and as a result have become increasingly interested in the effort to stabilize racially changing Jewish communities. They have been handicap ped by the lack of information on the strengths and weaknesses of different racial stabilization strategies. Ironically, a large proportion of the academic case studies of racially changing communities have been of Jewish com munities: the Mattapan section of Boston (Ginsberg, 1975), the South Shore Community of Chicago (Molotch, 1972), and several communities in De troit (Wolf and Lebeaux, 1967). Unfortunately these studies devote little or