The Jews of Westchester (review)

In the geographical imagery of the contemporary Jewish community, Westchester County symbolizes much that is good and bad about the North American experience. On one hand, Westchester represents Jewish physical, social, and cultural integration into the dominant secular suburban society. At the same time, the suburban county’s reputation for elitism and exclusivity reminds Jews of their minority status in a predominantly Christian environment. This on-going duality underlies Baila Shargel and Harold Drimmer’s informative Jewish history of New York’s most famous suburban community.

Packed with photographs and presented in an easy-to-read layout, The Jews of Westchester takes readers through three centuries of local Jewish history. The book’s first section tells the story from colonial times through the late-nineteenth century. Here, the reader learns about the county’s earliest Jewish families as well as local Jewish involvement in the American Revolution and, later, the Civil War. Written by Drimmer, these chapters draw on many original sources, including archives, diaries, and the credit reports of the R. G. Dun Company. In the book’s second half, Baila Shargel brings the history from the 1880s to the present. She traces Westchester’s Jewish communities, from their formation in the early part of the century, through “expansion and retrenchment” in the interwar years, to their post-war transformation and integration into the suburban environment. Shargel blends her use of synagogue records and local newspapers with extensive oral histories of many surviving participants in this suburbanization experience. Throughout all of these chapters, readers are treated to descriptions of religious and communal institutions and to analyses of social, economic and political life. The detail of names and places will undoubtedly ring more familiar to Westchester readers than to outsiders, but even non-local readers will appreciate this work brimming with anecdotes and memories.

Two themes dominate this work. First is the ongoing Jewish fight to integrate into an elitist, suburban environment which had clear anti-semitic overtones. The anti-Jewish bias could be subtle, as evidenced in the nineteenth-century Dun Reports usage of the derogatory “Jew” or the respectful “Israelite.” Alternatively, as Shargel discusses, anti-semitism could be overt (restrictive residential covenants) and even violent (1949 Peekskill riots). The book’s second theme centers on attempts to forge a coherent regional Jewish identity among the scattered and unconnected suburban communities. These efforts have not entirely succeeded, according to the book’s authors, both because of the Jewish community’s spatial dispersal and because of external interference from Jewish organizations in New York.

If The Jews of Westchester falls short, it is in the area of contextual analysis. Although the detailed narrative often tries to place events within larger historical contexts, too often the effect is superficial, with merely an introductory sentence leading into a detailed discussion of a particular individual or organization. The reader is left wondering if the Jews of Westchester are like the Jews of Long Island or suburban Chicago or Los Angeles. Why or why not? Even a minimal amount of comparison would have enhanced discussions of local anti-semitism or communal organizational development. Similarly, an analysis of suburban community structures would have aided the authors’ point about regional Jewish identities. One can easily imagine that the failure to hew county-wide Jewish community structures stemmed as much from the general aspatial nature of suburban life as from obstruction by New York City’s Jewish leaders.

For too long, Jewish historians have relied on outdated 1950s sociological analyses of suburbanization. This work begins to fashion a new and welcome perspective by showing first that Jewish suburbanization predated the 1950s by almost three centuries and second that Jewish suburbia was as complex and diverse as were urban Jewish communities. Although a scholarly audience might have preferred a broader and more theoretically contextual work, The Jews of Westchester deserves to be read, particularly in the Jewish homes of Scarsdale, New Rochelle, and the dozens of other communities of the county. For an older generation, the text...