All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City (review)

Ethnic and racial diversity is the very essence of New York City. The city has resonated with the languages of the world from its settlement years as New Amsterdam to its development into a world metropolis in the twentieth century. Writing a history of its ethnic and racial groups is to discover—paraphrasing Oscar Handlin—that they were the city’s history. Readers will find in this useful work not only discussion of each major group—and a number of minor ones—but also valuable information on the city’s politics, schools, neighborhoods, employment structure, housing problems and organizational life.

Frederick Binder and David Reimers have synthesized the vast secondary literature on New York’s ethnics and provided an effective statement on the interaction between the city and its diverse inhabitants. New York’s Jewish community, having played such a major role in the city’s development, is covered extensively. Beginning with the Sephardic migration of the seventeenth century, the authors detail the growth and impact of this group. They are very effective when dealing with such topics as the Jewish role in politics, the garment industry, unions and schools. Covered as well are the issues of discrimination and intra and intergroup conflict. Many stories will be familiar to students of the New York Jewish experience. For example the German Jewish reaction to their Eastern European brethren, the development of the landsmanshaft organizations, Jewish occupational mobility, the role of socialism in Jewish politics, and the emergence of the Yiddish theater all have been told in great detail elsewhere. However, this book succeeds well in bringing the information together, tying it to New York history and including comparable information on other ethnic groups as well.

Especially welcome is the attention paid to New York’s newest immigrants in the chapter on New York as a global city (chapter 7). How these immigrants adjusted and how they have begun to change the city in ways similar to their immigrant predecessors are important questions that link the earlier immigrants to the recent arrivals. Their longing for economic opportunity and/or political freedom reveals that immigrant desires remain the same whether the sending country is Ireland or Haiti.

There are some problems with the book. At times, as the authors go from one group to another, the book takes on a textbook or encyclopedia quality. For example, chapter 6 covers Germans, Irish, Jews, Blacks, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Japanese and briefly Koreans, Filipinos, Asian Indians, and Greeks. It is a strength of the book that not only the major groups are discussed. However, the authors, at times, fall into a monotony of mentioning New York’s ethnics one after the other but without saying enough about the smaller groups. Also the book needs maps and illustrations. Neighborhoods and the shifting ethnic presence should have been located on maps; illustrations would have captured the New York mosaic in ways that words could not.

Without minimizing these problems, they do not significantly detract from the value of this work. Writing a history of New York’s ethnic diversity is in itself a heroic task. The authors have accomplished their goal in a book that is filled with worthwhile detail, yet is concise and readable. All the Nations Under Heaven is a valuable work that will be useful to all students of ethnicity and New York.