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New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (review)

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajh.1997.0022

1086-3141

Shelly Tenenbaum,

Race, History, and American Society

Reviewed by: New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise Shelly Tenenbaum New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise. By Beth S. Wenger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. pp. 206. When studying the 1930s, historians of American Jewry have focused their scholarly attention almost exclusively on American responses to the enormity of Nazi atrocities, leaving the Depression experiences of Jewish-Americans virtually unexplored. Beth Wenger’s book New York Jews and the Great Depression makes great strides towards filling this gap in our understanding of Jewish life during the tumultuous decade of the thirties. Weaving together oral histories, communal records, memoirs, novels, and newspaper reports into a rich narrative, Wenger provides a model for how to write social history that highlights the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender. The analysis is smart, the prose lively, and the physical product strikingly elegant. Each chapter is a gem. Wenger highlights socio-economic class as a primary factor that shaped the way Jews fared during the Great Depression. For some depression-era families, existence was a daily struggle while for others, amenities such as vacations and hired help remained possible. By emphasizing social class, she offers an implicit corrective to studies that assume a homogeneity of experience and ignore differences among Jews. Acknowledging that most Jews had entered the middle-class by the time the stock market crashed, Wenger argues that to focus exclusively on the experience of the majority masks the severe hardship suffered by [End Page 345] lower-income Jews during the crisis. “Jewish working-class families, who bore the brunt of the Depression’s hardships, hardly took comfort in the general white-collar profile of their ethnic group. Those who labored in the garment trades or other industries, a full one-third of the New York Jewish population, were utterly devastated by layoffs and unemployment” (p. 18). To show the multiplicity of experiences in a city as layered and large as New York, Wenger, in her chapter “The Landscape of Jewish Life,” offers a tour of Jewish neighborhoods. First, she visits two of the poorest Jewish districts—Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn’s Brownsville—where high percentages of Jewish residents relied on federal welfare during the economic crisis. After describing other Brooklyn working-class neighborhoods, including Orthodox Williamsburg, Wenger moves on to the predominately middle-class areas of Eastern Parkway, Borough Park and Flatbush. There professionals and business owners lived in spacious housing on tree-lined streets, prayed in modern synagogues, exercised in Jewish recreational facilities, and benefited from financial cushions that helped them to weather the Depression with relative ease. From Brooklyn, Wenger heads to the Bronx where she juxtaposes the solidly middle-class West Bronx with its much poorer counterpart the East Bronx, home to several apartment cooperatives and center of political radicalism. Wenger returns to Manhattan to describe New York’s only affiuent Jewish neighborhood, the Upper West Side. Wenger argues that New York Jews negotiated the Depression as families and not as individuals. The crisis heightened family members’ financial interdependence; wives who had been out of the paid labor force returned to work and children juggled schooling with part-time employment. During the thirties, over 90 percent of New York Jews under the age of twenty-five lived with their parents. Family cooperation, however, did not always translate into family harmony. During the Depression, the Jewish Conciliation Court was fiooded with domestic disputes often involving cases of children not supporting parents, and of husbands not supporting wives. But, at the same time that family confiicts escalated, unemployment and low incomes reduced the incidence of Jewish men deserting their families, reversing a trend that had been in place for decades. According to the Forward and National Desertion Bureau, “the lower incidence of Jewish desertion was one of the few positive results of the Great Depression” (p. 53). Young Jewish women and men were over represented in New York’s evening high schools and colleges throughout the Depression years. For many, college served as a refuge from a lack of job opportunities. Employers’ preferences for hiring non-Jews made finding even a meager [End Page 346] job very difficult. Highlighting structural constraints...