The Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and MetroWest

by William B. Helmreich (Editor)

From its founding in the late seventeenth century, Newark, New Jersey, was a vibrant and representative center of Jewish life in America. Geographically and culturally situated between New York City and its outlying suburbs, Newark afforded Jewish residents the advantages of a close-knit community along with the cultural abundance and social dynamism of urban life. In Newark, all of the representative stages of modern Jewish experience were enacted, from immigration and acculturation to upward mobility and community building. The Enduring Community is a lively and evocative social history of the Jewish presence in Newark as well as an examination of what Newark tells us about social assimilation, conflict and change. Grounded in documentary research, the volume makes extensive use of interviews and oral histories. The author traces the growth of the Jewish population in the pre-Revolutionary period to its settlement of German Jews in the 1840s and Eastern European Jews in the 1880s. Helmreich delineates areas of contention and cooperation between these groups and relates how an American identity was eventually forged within the larger ethnic mix of the city. Jewish population in politics, the establishment of Jewish schools, synagogues, labor unions, charities, and community groups are described together with cultural and recreational life. Despite the formal and emotional bonds that formed over a century, Jewish neighborhoods in Newark did not survive the postwar era. The trek to the suburbs, the erosion of Newark's tax base, and deteriorating services accelerated a movement outward that mirrored the demographic patterns of cities across America. By the time of the Newark riots in 1967, the Jewish presence was largely absent. This volume reclaims a lost history and gives personalized voice to the dreams, aspirations, and memories of a dispersed community. It demonstrates how former Newarkers built new Jewish communities in the surrounding suburbs, an area dubbed "MetroWest" by Jewish leaders. The Enduring Community is must reading for students of Jewish social history, sociologists, urban studies specialists, and readers interested in the history of New Jersey. The book includes archival photographs form the periods discussed.

408 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

William Helmreich was a professor of sociology at the City College of New York Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He specialized in race and ethnic relations, religion, immigration, risk behavior, the sociology of New York City, urban sociology, consumer behavior, and market research.

Reviews

[FL · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned of Helmreich from his recent-ish obituaries, which all mentioned his _The New York Nobody Knows_. That book, of course, has spectacularly mixed reviews on this site---but it left me curious to see more of his life project.

Unfortunately, _The Enduring Community_ doesn't live up to the standards of his later work---although his "popular history" is impeccably comprehensive, it reads too much like an overgrown Encyclopedia article rather than like either a sociological study or a personal reflection (his later books are somewhere between those). There are various glimmers of interesting detail, as revealed in his references to extensive interviews (detailed further in the chapter endnotes), but surprisingly little integration of those details into why they matter to people, rather than using them just to establish some timelines and interconnections.

Given how much time he spends talking about fieldwork in other projects, I'm left wondering why. Maybe, as a scholar used to talking about his present, he just has trouble talking about the past? But even his last chapter, discussing the (then-)current MetroWest federation, he mostly catalogs statistics, rather than talking about who really is using the facilities.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess I wanted something a bit more sociological, or more rigorous. Helmreich went to some archives and flipped through his Philip Roth collection, added some of his personal experience and wrote the kind of rambling and bittersweet version of the story that you might get if you worked in a Jewish old age home and were a very good listener. Actually, no, I think Helmreich should have done more of that himself, although there does seem to be flashes of oral history in his account and the occasional survey or statistical study does poke its nose in. I also had the feeling that after getting so much cooperation from the MetroWest organization he didn't want to be all that critical so his history does this thing: what ever happened in the past was ultimately for the good, because look how great everything is now! Which is not so terrible when you are writing about the centralization of charity organizations or changes in synagogue leadership but I get annoyed when he is writing about breaking unions that were too communist or about the fate of certain anti-Zionist personalities. Fortunately, the biggest thing in the history of Newark's Jews -- the Riot -- is handled well and Helmreich makes no bones about the fact that Jewish 'white flight' had already passed the tipping point in Newark before the riot. Still, I liked reading this book even if it was at times slow going and it is definitely useful if you plan to spend any amount of time with Jews in Essex County of a certain age, so you can hold your own when the baloney starts flying. Judging from some of the excerpts in here, maybe Philip Roth wouldn't be such a terrible novelist to read after all. I'll get to him when I finish with Amiri Baraka.