Race and Religion Among the Chosen People of Crown Heights

Chapter 2: Geographies of Difference: Producing a Jewish Neighborhood

2 Geographies of Difference Producing a Jewish Neighborhood New York City is often described, by New Yorkers and others, as a city of neighborhoods—a patchwork metropolis made up of distinctive places, with flavors and characters all their own. “The Village” could never be mistaken for “Midtown,” “Kew Gardens” for “Astoria,” or “Williamsburg” for “Brooklyn Heights.” The boundaries of such places are often tied to the identities of the city’s racial, ethnic, and religious communities. Blackness and Whiteness are conveniently localized at symbolically charged sites like “Harlem” and “Bensonhurst,” while immigrants are imagined to live in enclaves like “Chinatown” and “The Lower East Side.” The concept of the neighborhood—and it is a concept, not just a place on a map—thus shapes the contours of urban politics and social relations.1 Most Crown Heights residents, both Black and Jewish, describe “Crown Heights” as a distinctive place with a flavor and character all its own. And many imagine part of south Crown Heights as a “Jewish neighborhood ” intimately tied to the collective identity of the Lubavitch Hasidim. This shared sense of communal boundaries has shaped the contours of Black-Jewish relations in a number of complex ways. For example , as I described in chapter 1, Charles Price’s incitement to violence on August 19, 1991 invoked a spatial sense of Black-Jewish difference. Price reportedly told the crowd at the scene of the accident that killed Gavin Cato, “I’m going up to the Jew neighborhood! Who’s with me?” then cried out, “Let’s go to Kingston Avenue and get the Jews!” He thus envisioned the Jews of Crown Heights as a geographically bounded community, de- fined by its ties to a distinctive place—a “Jew[ish] neighborhood” built 76 around “Kingston Avenue.” But what, exactly, are the boundaries of this place? And how, exactly, does it differ from surrounding places? How, in other words, have Crown Heights residents imagined and produced a spatial difference between Blacks and Jews? These are the central questions I will address in this chapter. There is, in fact, an area of relatively concentrated Jewish settlement in south Crown Heights—an area that differs to some extent from nearby areas, with regard to racial and religious demography, socioeconomic class, and certain other social indicators. This chapter will describe and historicize these differences in detail, but let me sketch them briefly here. There are about12,000 Jews, all but a few of whom are Lubavitch Hasidim, living in a fifty-odd square-block area of south Crown Heights—an area some Lubavitchers describe as the whole of “Crown Heights”—which is more or less bounded by Eastern Parkway to the north, Lefferts Avenue to the south, Nostrand Avenue to the west, and Rochester Avenue to the east (see figure 6). Jews only make up about 20 percent of the population of this area, but in north-central Brooklyn, which is overwhelmingly Black for miles in every direction, this substantial minority is enough to mark the area as “Jewish.” Jewish life in Crown Heights is centered, to a large extent, on Kingston Avenue. The world headquarters of the Lubavitch community (including a large synagogue, a yeshiva, and a small office building) is located at the corner of Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue, and the six blocks of Kingston between Eastern Parkway and Empire Boulevard are home to many Jewish communal institutions and Hasidic-owned stores, some of which cater to local Jewish needs for kosher food, religious texts, and ritual items (see figure 7). The residential blocks straddling this stretch of Kingston, between New York Avenue to the west and Troy Avenue to the east, form the densest area of Jewish settlement in Crown Heights, where Hasidim make up almost 40 percent of the population (again, see figure 6). This limited area is also home to some of the most beautiful and wellkept housing in central Brooklyn—blocks of spacious and elegant brownstone and limestone row houses, smaller brick row houses with tiny front lawns, low-rise apartment buildings with airy inner courts, and a block or two of honest-to-goodness mansions. Not surprisingly, the median income in this area is higher than in nearby areas with poorer housing. GEOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE 77 FIGURE 6 The approximate boundaries of “Crown Heights” according to various neighborhood residents. The largest outlined area is the whole of Crown Heights, as its boundaries are...