Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, The History of an Idea - Main Discussion

[Carly]

Looking at the reviews for this book, it seems I might be in the minority, but I found it a really instructive and a compelling read overall.

I learned about Jewish ghettos in Europe, about restrictive covenants, about the Harlem Children's Zone, and about dominant racial themes in sociology that I never realized so strongly influenced our public policy and national thought. I was intrigued by the massive confluence of "vicious cycles" that operate in American ghettos and the vastly different ways people think about and try to address them. I think it's important that the author addresses the duality of a ghetto being a place where flourishing and oppression can happen simultaneously (not necessarily at the same level, but at the same time).

I think one of the book's most important assertions is the following:

"Day after day, my students and I saw what it meant to treat the Jewish communities before the Holocaust as worthy of their own memory, a memory separate from the Holocaust... One of the most important realizations we had in the museum was that Jewish life in Poland prior to the Holocaust has been largely forgotten, overwhelmed as it was by the memory of the Holocaust itself. The Nazis thus blotted out not only the lives of millions of people, but also the history of the culture of a particular people."

Which of course is what ghettos (and our rhetoric about ghettos, our policies regarding ghettos) can do - blot out the individual lives of the people who live there. I've heard that one of Duneier's other books called Sidewalk delivers many stories of these lives, and I look forward to reading that one soon.