The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (review)

Dr. Irving Cutler of Chicago, who is renowned for his lectures and knowledge of the city’s ethnicity, has written a splendid study of Chicago’s Jewish communities. Cutler chronicles the odyssey from the Eastern European shtetl to the American suburb, a process completed in just three generations. He presents the story with marvelous visual evidence, photo documentation and superb ethnographic mapping of Jewish institutions in Chicago. Cutler also interweaves into the big picture of social change and economic progress exemplary biographies of immigrant and second-generation success stories: Benny Goodman the king of swing, Paul Muni the actor, Arthur Goldberg Supreme Court justice, William Paley media giant, and Hyman Rickover the father of the nuclear navy, all had their origins in the humble area of first settlement, the Maxwell street ghetto. Within a generation the ragged parade of newcomers and their children were in the process of building an urban middle class, scaling Mammon’s mountain with astonishing speed as they ascended up the socio-economic ladder. Jewish socialism, once a heady and yeasty European transplant was a vanishing phenomenon by the 1950s, a victim of the high individual achievements of the group and increasing acculturation. Jews created their own worldly utopias, not through the precepts of Karl Marx but through education, occupations and high incomes.

Yet it was the Greater Lawndale community, just three miles west of Maxwell Street, and the second area of settlement that produced the great flowering of Jewish life and institutions in Chicago. Here in the 1930s and 1940s was located about 40 percent of Chicago’s Jewish population. The area mushroomed with every kind of Jewish institution—yeshivas, temples of all persuasions except German Reform, worker groups, publications, fraternals and social organizations and meeting halls, live theater, vaudeville, bakeries, delis and sports associations. Never before or after had Chicago created such a dense network and web of Jewish institutions as in this second area of settlement. Marvelous photos, superb mapping and poignant text capture the memories of this community. It was also Greater Lawndale where Leo Rosten taught greenhorns English and from whence sprang his popular book, THE EDUCATION OF H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Smack in the center was the famous 43rd ward which produced such a staggering Democratic vote in 1936 that President Roosevelt called it the “number one ward in the Democratic party” when it produced 36,000 votes for Roosevelt and a measly 900 for his opponent Alfred Landon.

Yet by the 1950s a large Southern black migration was pushing into the area and Jews once again were on the move. Unlike most ethnic groups who tended to move block by block, so that enthnographers can actually trace their settlement trail even today, Jews leapfrogged over the entire central-western section of Chicago and came down on the Northside of Chicago, spread into suburban Skokie and from there into the north and northwestern suburbs.

Chicago’s older and more and more established German-Jewish community in its South Shore and University of Chicago-Hyde Park neighborhoods is also given some attention as are the leading exemplars of that community—Dr. Emil Hirsch, an important Reform rabbi, Julius Rosenwald, who put Sears and Roebuck into the bucks, and University of Chicago President Edward Levi, who also served as President Ford’s attorney general.

Cutler brings his study to closure by a brief review of the most recent newcomers, glasnost and post-Soviet Jews, and also a review of the last important Jewish business street in the city, Devon Avenue. Once a predominantly Jewish business artery, it is now shared with a large Asian-Indian business section, appropriately called “Gandhi Marg,” as well as a Southeast Asian business sector. By then the city’s Jewish population was in precipitous decline. Another demographic shift had occurred whereby in the 1990s two-thirds of Chicago’s Jews lived in the suburbs, a sharp contrast to the numbers in 1950 when...