Was the Jewish Bronx really a paradise?
A new book looks at the borough from 1930 to 1963
In 1930, the Bronx was 50 percent Jewish. It’s a statistic that always surprises me, partly because the intense Jewish nostalgia over the Lower East Side and Brooklyn overshadows the Bronx, and partly because, unlike the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, there are many fewer Jews who still live there or are active remnants of the borough’s Jewish heyday.
In “Paradise Bronx,” Ian Frazier’s new and moving history of the borough, that heyday fell “approximately between the arrival of paving in the 1910s and the completion of the Cross Bronx Expressway in 1963” — that highway carved a canyon through the heart of the Bronx’s vibrant if by-then struggling ethnic communities. At the beginning, a building boom in the 1910s and ’20s held down rents and boosted more than half a million Jews up another rung on the ladder. If they didn’t have jobs in the Garment District, they opened small businesses on the ground floors of the new buildings. They built “splendid synagogues in architectural styles previously never seen in these regions,” Frazier wrote.
This was the era of “the front-stoop Bronx,” where “neighbors sat outside in the evenings and kids played games in the street.” Families paraded on the Grand Concourse, the borough’s Champs-Élysées, catching a movie at Loew’s Paradise Theater or the Ascot, sipping sodas at Krum’s, or gathering outside the synagogues on Shabbat and holidays.
The Jewish communities Frazier describes are almost unrecognizable from the ones we know today. Many of the Bronx’s Jews were not just liberals but leftists, leading rent strikes against greedy landlords. There were machers, of course, but most of the Jews were working- and middle-class, and it was their kids who would go on to become professionals and writers, academics and money managers.
Frazier is my favorite New Yorker writer, and journalism’s greatest enthusiast. He seems to have walked every block of the borough in the decade he wrote the book, and to have talked to nearly all of its 1.4 million residents. Jews play only a small part in the book, which traces the Bronx’s history from the colonial era through its decline and recovery over the past 60 years. The book is a celebration of what cities can be, and an indictment of the political and economic actors who too often aid and abet their demise.
And it is a gentle reminder to cool it with the nostalgia. At least in the memories of the second- and third-generation Jewish children who grew up there, the Bronx was a place to leave behind — a reminder that a parent’s paradise can be a child’s purgatory. “It was the bleakness of expectation, the stultified vision and resented courage, that dragged us — the children — down, and made us hate the place,” the writer Vivian Gornick wrote in a 2001 New York Times essay about growing up in the West Farms area:
“Our longing to get out of the Bronx was intense, and it induced, paradoxically, a solidarity that many were to carry well into other lives: the inevitable mixed legacy of the ghetto. For that’s what the Bronx was for us: a working-class ghetto destined to be deserted by its young. By the time I graduated from college, nearly everyone I’d grown up with was gone, and the neighborhood itself was on its way down into the kind of urban defeat that has, over the last three decades, made headlines.”
The cartoonist, screenwriter, and playwright Jules Feiffer, who died last month at 95, grew up in the Soundview area. He also spoke about his reasons for leaving what he called a prison, from the bland food his mother overcooked to the conformist lessons imparted by his public school teachers. “All the kids I grew up with, everybody I knew, as poor as we were, all of us assumed we’d do well,” he told the Yiddish Book Center in 2017. “All of us assumed this was temporary and we’re going to find our way out of here [the Bronx] and we’re going to be an American, and we’ll be successful Americans, and we’ll be part of that American dream, which was very important to us.”
And while Feiffer says he got a lot more out of the public library than the synagogue, he didn’t see leaving as an escape from being Jewish — but rather moving from the insular, “oppressive” Jewishness he knew at home toward the “smart-ass, funny, wise-guy” Jewishness he found in Manhattan. Leaving “was not at odds with being Jewish,” he said, but a rejection of “the notion of being a Bronx Jew.”
The Bronx, like its Jewish community, didn’t disappear, but became something new, first for the worse, then for the better. “The borough’s population is more than 85 percent Black and brown today,” Frazier wrote. Thousands of buildings burned during the violence and municipal neglect of the 1960s and ’70s; heroic neighborhood associations and local activists led efforts to restore many of those burned-out blocks as havens for immigrants and the working class. Now, when buildings are razed, the culprit is less likely to be an arsonist or faulty wiring than a luxury developer.
an exhibit at the Henry S. Miller Judaica Research room at Fordham University)
The Jews, meanwhile, did well indeed, building new communities in the suburbs, or modern-day “front-stoop” neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and Park Slope in Brooklyn. (Most big cities have a similar story to tell.) New kinds of Jewish neighborhoods include tight-knit modern Orthodox enclaves like the Bronx’s Riverdale section (which, oddly, Frazier doesn’t mention) and Teaneck, and intensely inward-looking (and ever-growing) shtetls like Brooklyn’s Borough Park and Kiryas Joel in New York State’s Orange County. Russian Jews in Brighton Beach and Persian Jews in Los Angeles made something new. South Florida is quickly becoming its own kind of Jewish paradise.
And if non-Orthodox Jews are no longer living in ghettos, they find each other not because they are bunching as Jews but as members of the college-educated class.
I grew up in a white suburb where Jews were plentiful but a minority. As an adult I gravitated toward more intensely Jewish neighborhoods; most of the kids I grew up with did not. That’s a Jewish trend, too: A minority of Jews are making more Jewish choices, while the majority do not. The new ghettos are hotbeds of Jewish growth: The percentage of American Jews who identify as Orthodox is expected to swell from 12 percent today to an estimated 29 percent in 2063, while the percentage of Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews is expected to decline. It will be seen whether today’s concerns over Jewish safety and belonging will alter this trend.
“Paradise Bronx” recalls a different, even short-lived era, when economics, familiarity, discrimination, and expanding opportunity drew Jews to create a vast ethnic enclave, no matter their religious choices. For my money, the book’s greatest gift is its reminder that cities and communities are fluid, ever-changing things — which is either a warning to enjoy them while you can, to stop wallowing in nostalgia or, occasionally, to get out while the getting is good.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Andrew Silow-Carroll of Teaneck is the editor at large of the New York Jewish Week and managing editor for Ideas for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He is the former editor in chief and CEO of the New Jersey Jewish News.
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