In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics
  • Ronald H. Bayor
White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics. By Joshua M. Zeitz (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007278 pp. $24.95

White Ethnic New York describes the tensions between Jewish and Catholic (Irish and Italian) New Yorkers after World War II. Employing chapter headings such as “Fascism,” and “Communism,” Zeitz seeks to bring the conflicts of the 1930s into the postwar era, but he does not provide the background needed to understand the events and attitudes indicated in the later period. He provides little information about the Spanish Civil War or Father Charles Coughlin’s rhetoric, which divided ethnic New Yorkers, and none about the Christian Front of the 1930s, which split the city’s New Deal Jewish-Catholic coalition and resulted in neighborhood violence. Nor does he discuss how the groups responded to the Rosenberg case after the war, although he manages to cover Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s influence in detail.

Zeitz fares better in his analysis of the cultural roots of Jewish and [End Page 300] Catholic political divisions and of the racial aspects of New York’s political and cultural life from the 1960s onward. According to Zeitz, Jews saw dissent, anti-authoritarianism, and activism as Jewish values, whereas Catholics held respect for authority and community as core Catholic values. These groups’ cultural norms clashed during various events and political campaigns, especially involving liberal and conservative issues.

Zetiz effectively examines the Jewish–Black conflict, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy in 1968, although he does not offer Catholic views about these matters. Generally, Zeitz argues that changes in race relations tended to draw white ethnic opinion together, as he shows through voting results and public-opinion surveys. His analysis of Mayor John Lindsay’s campaigns and administrations as well as the influence of the New Left on ethnic views is useful.

When Zeitz deals with Catholic attitudes before the 1960s, he appears to be writing about the Irish exclusively. His sources are Irish newspapers and organizations. Because he includes no Italian sources, his presentation of viewpoints is severely limited. Also, although he uses oral-history collections, he conducted no interviews of his own. Given the recent history with which he deals, interviews would have helped to convey the thinking of ethnic communities and give voice to neighborhood tensions. The lack of an intense focus on neighborhoods limits the study. The methodology is generally traditional. A neighborhood approach, looking closely at those areas that saw Irish-Jewish and Irish-Italian conflict and later Jewish–Black conflict, would have provided the detail this city of distinct neighborhoods requires. The inclusion of voting statistics drawn from secondary sources offers important information, but, again, the data often do not reflect trends at the neighborhood level.

The book provides a good illustration that, contrary to the “whiteness” historians, “whiteness did not equal sameness,” at least in New York. This important point has been submerged in various historians’ efforts to declare each group as “white” during the 1940s or earlier. Differences remained into the 1970s at least, and evidence of diversity within the white ethnic communities continued afterward.

In all, Zeitz provides an interesting and, at times, trenchant account of ethnic relations after the war, but he omits too much to secure a full understanding of the behavior of these groups.

Ronald H. Bayor
Georgia Tech
...

pdf

Share