Blacks and Jews in New York City

Home , Jews in New York City, Lower East Side

Harlem and the Lower East Side are two world famous neighborhoods in New York City that evoke not only a rich if contested history but also a specific ethnic or racial narrative. In the past year I have come to understand that these two urban enclaves are quite unique in the way they have been imagined and represented in twentieth-century U.S. popular Blacks and Jews culture, and in the imagination of American in New York City Jews and Blacks more particularly. No other minority groups in the U.S. have so completely understood themselves through and identi- Catherine Rottenberg fied with a particular swath of city space. One cannot tell the history of U.S. Jewry or discuss the emergence of Jewish-American literature without the Lower East Side. Similarly, if one is interested in African-American literary and artistic traditions, Harlem is indispensable. Initially, I set out to look at the literary representations of these two Manhattan neighborhoods in early twentieth-century Jewish- and African-American fiction. How- ever, following the recommendations of my Frankel colleagues, I began reading contemporary scholarship on the Lower East Side and Harlem, and I found out that quite a bit has been written about the iconicity of these urban enclaves. Many Jewish-American scholars, for instance, agree that the Lower East Side has become a site of intense emotional investment for Jewish Americans and that, in the post–World War II era, there has been a certain sacralization of this neighborhood. Moreover, scholars maintain that the Lower East Side has, over the years, become suffused both with nostalgia and mystique. By evoking its name, by identifying with it, Jewish Ameri- cans can both stake a claim in a common Jewish-American history and in a dominant Jewish-American narrative, one which tells the story of poor immigrants who rose out of the slums and entered middle-class U.S. society. Just as important, the neighborhood has come

40 to represent Jewish authenticity. In the minds linear story, since the hope Harlem represents of many Jewish Americans, the Lower East Side has always dovetailed with despair. The story lays claim to a traditionalism, a purer and more Harlem points to is zigzagged and jagged-edged. authentic “Judaism.” Thus, Jews today attempt While part of the reason for the to tap into, if not reclaim, this authenticity by divergent processes of iconization derives appropriating the urban enclave as their own. from the lived history of the two peoples in From the outset one notices a dif- these neighborhoods, another part reflects ference in the way Harlem signifies. Scholars the perspectives from which each commu- do not talk about cultural memory in the nity tells its story. Contemporary Jews’ nearly same way when speaking about Harlem for universal middle-class status has made it less the simple reason that Harlem, as a site of problematic to identify with the immigrant crowded Black urban life, did not disappear milieu. Jews can and do look back to the Lower over the course of the twentieth century. Yet East Side lovingly from the ease of postwar Harlem has become a place associated with acceptance. By sharp contrast, while there are cultural exemplarity and a site of intense more middle-class African Americans than emotional investment. Beginning with the ever before, there are simultaneously more Harlem Renaissance, Harlem has continuously underclass African Americans than ever before served as a catch-phrase or even catch-all in U.S. history. Harlem as a metaphor seems to for African-American life, both in scholarship incorporate and express these two jarring and and in literature. Like the Lower East Side for discordant “facts.” Jews, Harlem has been the place that African Given the exceptionality of these two Americans embraced as the Plymouth Rock of “ethnic” enclaves, I thought that a comparative African-American history — at least in terms study of how these two urban spaces have of the escape from the persecution of Jim Crow helped fashion twentieth-century Black and and the place where Blacks could practice hith- Jewish self-representation was long overdue. erto unknown cultural freedoms. But Harlem As my year at the Frankel Institute progressed, as a site of memory and communal attachment I decided to divide my project into two parts. has a much darker side as well, one that has The bulk of my research still focuses on the not been, and perhaps cannot be, romanticized way these two city spaces are represented in away or smoothed over, as it seems to have early-twentieth-century Jewish- and African- been in the narrative currently being told about American literature. The literary relationship the Lower East Side. Indeed, Harlem has also to these urban spaces reveals, I believe, a come to stand in for the nightmare of Black great deal about the way Blacks and Jews were inner-city life. positioned — as well as the way they posi- Thus, one notices a deep ambivalence tioned themselves — in relation to dominant in the very iconicity of Harlem, an ambivalence U.S. society. Yet as a result of discussions with that hardly exists in contemporary representa- my Frankel colleagues, I have decided to frame tions of the Lower East Side. Unlike its Jewish my entire discussion of the literary repre- counterpart, whose sacralization has produced sentations using contemporary discourses of a narrative of linearity — from ghetto to middle- Harlem and the Lower East Side, that is, how class, with some nostalgic loss and sadness contemporary scholars present the signifi- on the way — Harlem’s sacralization has not cance of Harlem and the Lower East Side for resulted from a “progressive,” one-way, and the African-American and Jewish-American

41 communities’ self-conception. This part of the research has been especially fascinating, since it covers entirely new ground for me. While the literary representations give us a sense of what Harlem and the Lower East Side meant for Blacks and Jews during the Progressive Era and Harlem Renaissance, incorporating contemporary discussions helps to strengthen my claim that these spaces have been crucial sites through which African-Americanness and Jewish-Americanness have been shaped.