Search Results

The Problems and Paradoxes of Race

Richard Alba and Nancy Foner

in Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe

This chapter focuses on race, with a stress on the special position of the United States. While color-coded race is a source of stigma in Canada and Western Europe, it is a more severe barrier in the ... More

This chapter focuses on race, with a stress on the special position of the United States. While color-coded race is a source of stigma in Canada and Western Europe, it is a more severe barrier in the United States, especially for immigrants of African ancestry and their children, owing to the legacy of slavery, legal segregation, and ghettoization. Yet, the paradox of racial dynamics in the United States is that they have also had some positive consequences for immigrants there, who are overwhelmingly people of color from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. Ultimately, the heritage of the U.S. civil rights movement and legislation of the 1960s as well as the sheer presence and size of the native black population have provided immigrants in the United States with certain advantages that they lack in Europe and Canada.Less

The East Sutherland Fishing Communities

Nancy C. Dorian

in Investigating Variation: The Effects of Social Organization and Social Setting

This chapter describes the history and social structure of the Gaelic‐speaking East Sutherland fishing communities. Forced relocation and involuntary occupational transition to fishing during the ... More

This chapter describes the history and social structure of the Gaelic‐speaking East Sutherland fishing communities. Forced relocation and involuntary occupational transition to fishing during the Highland Clearances of the early nineteenth century resulted in evictee status, ghettoization, uniform occupation, shared poverty, social stigmatization, and endogamy. These in turn produced distinctive lifeways and distinctive Gaelic speech. The strong face‐to‐face character of the Gaelic‐speaking fishing communities emerged from small population size, common occupation, egalitarianism, high density of interaction, multiplex social roles, and well‐maintained multiple kinship ties.Less

Ghetto and Suburb

Panikos Panayi

in Migrant City: A New History of London

This chapter examines patterns of migrant settlement in London. The visibility of migrants in London often became associated with concentration in what contemporary observers often essentially ... More

This chapter examines patterns of migrant settlement in London. The visibility of migrants in London often became associated with concentration in what contemporary observers often essentially regarded as ghettoes — from the Irish ‘rookery’ in St Giles during the eighteenth century to the Jewish East End by the late Victorian period to the ‘coloured quarter’ immediately after the end of the Second World War, focused especially upon the East End, but increasingly moving to other parts of the capital, including South London, especially around Brixton. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ethnic concentrations which had characterized the history of London became a feature of the entire metropolis, as a patchwork of ethnic concentrations developed. This apparent universalization of settlement based upon ethnic lines reflected the increasing numbers of migrants moving to London, as well as the growing diversification of these newcomers. Ghettoization, to the extent that it exists, offers just one way of understanding the living patterns of migrant populations in London.Less

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of the Ghettos

Michael Berkowitz

in The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality

This chapter explores “crime” in Nazi-created ghettos, which appeared to be incubators of crime because the Nazis fashioned them in such a way that living beyond the law was the only way to survive. ... More

This chapter explores “crime” in Nazi-created ghettos, which appeared to be incubators of crime because the Nazis fashioned them in such a way that living beyond the law was the only way to survive. The Nazis claimed that the exhibition of criminality in the ghettos revealed the true character of the Jews and was proof that their ghettoization was an urgent necessity. The chapter suggests that this was the reason why “smugglers” often became the Jews' heroes of the ghettos.Less

The Spot on the Lapel

Marianne Hirsch

in Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory

This chapter discusses the various traumatic events that the Cernăuti Jews experienced during the Second World War, describing Cernăuti in 1942, as it became a Romanian city which was controlled by a ... More

This chapter discusses the various traumatic events that the Cernăuti Jews experienced during the Second World War, describing Cernăuti in 1942, as it became a Romanian city which was controlled by a fascist Romanian government in collaboration and alliance with Nazi authorities. It then presents a street photograph of Carl and Lotte Hirsch, in which a mysterious spot can be seen on the lapel of Carl's suit. Next, the chapter describes Chernivtsi in 2000 and discusses wartime and immediate postwar Cernăuti, along with the Romanian and Bukowinian Holocaust. The final part of the chapter presents the authors' search for evidence of Carl and Lotte Hirsch's marriage, and discusses the ghettoization of the Cernăuti Jews.Less

Cropping the View: Reyner Banham and the Image of Buffalo

Hadas A. Steiner

in Buffalo at the Crossroads: The Past, Present, and Future of American Urbanism

This chapter discusses how the deployment of architectural history in Buffalo demonstrates how scholarship can be used to justify policies that reify segregation. It describes Buffalo as an ... More

This chapter discusses how the deployment of architectural history in Buffalo demonstrates how scholarship can be used to justify policies that reify segregation. It describes Buffalo as an industrial city where the longue durée of fiscal, racial, and ethnic ghettoization has stranded 30 percent of the population below the poverty line despite claims of an economic renaissance. It also cites the co-option of cultural capital by politicians and developers in relation to identifying how disciplinary resources might be directed elsewhere to stem the growing tide of spatial injustice. The chapter contrasts the most important aspects of the Buffalo landscape and the abstraction of its architecture into an aesthetic discourse. It recounts the terracotta fac¸ade of the Guaranty Building by Louis Sullivan that has now been restored and the demolition of the Larkin Administration Building by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1950.Less

Minhag and Migration: Yiddish Custom Books from Sixteenth-Century Italy

Lucia Raspe (ed.)

in Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews

This chapter recounts the migration of German Jews to Italy that can be traced to the final decades of the fourteenth century. It explains how the Jews were expelled from almost all of the German ... More

This chapter recounts the migration of German Jews to Italy that can be traced to the final decades of the fourteenth century. It explains how the Jews were expelled from almost all of the German cities and many principalities and came to a close with the warfare that ravaged northern Italy in the early 1500s. It also describes the Ashkenazi Jews who became a presence in numerous places that had not had a Jewish settlement, before settling at first in the towns and hamlets of the Friuli and the Venetian mainland, then moving on towards the Po valley. The chapter talks about the southward migration of Ashkenazi Jews that converged with a wave of indigenous Italian Jews moving north from Rome. It cites the ghettoization in the sixteenth century in Venice that forced Jews of all backgrounds into close proximity with one another.Less

Constructing Flexible Spaces of Accumulation and Social Reproduction

John J. Betancur and Janet L. Smith

in Claiming Neighborhood: New Ways of Understanding Urban Change

This chapter explores how today's neighborhoods operate as flexible spaces of accumulation that range between the extremes of gentrification and ghettoization. It first examines how the new ... More

This chapter explores how today's neighborhoods operate as flexible spaces of accumulation that range between the extremes of gentrification and ghettoization. It first examines how the new postindustrial regime weakened and dissolved the industrial era order of space, and how it gave rise to a distinct dialectic of ghettoization (disinvestment) and gentrification (investment) in central cities surrounded by a sprawling middle class expanding into the surrounding suburban space. The chapter then considers how the production of space under the new societal regime of flexible accumulation has redefined neighborhoods and social reproduction. It also looks at public–private partnerships that work around the new priorities of accumulation, focusing on the tax increment financing (TIF) district in Chicago. Finally, it discusses the ebbs and flows of neighborhood life today by referring to the experiences of Bronzeville, Pilsen, and Englewood.Less

The Pattern of Discrimination

Ariel Toaff

in Love, Work and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria

This chapter discusses Jewish–Christian relations in late medieval Italy. The daily business and general relations between Jews and the non-itinerant clergy in Umbrian communes in the late Middle ... More

This chapter discusses Jewish–Christian relations in late medieval Italy. The daily business and general relations between Jews and the non-itinerant clergy in Umbrian communes in the late Middle Ages were close and constant. However, from the fifteenth century onwards, in the communes of Umbria as elsewhere in Italy, there was a proliferation of legislative measures obliging Jews to wear something that would distinguish them from Christians. The imposition of the so-called ‘badge for Jews’ was justified by the hope that it would discourage sexual relations between infidels and Christians. The chapter then looks at the discrimination against the Jews during the triduum of the Christian Holy Week, particularly the holy sassaiola, the fight with stones. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the fate of the Jews became one with that of the gypsies. Ghettoization and segregation on the one hand, and expulsion on the other, were simply two sides of the same coin with which Christian society, now closed and homogeneous, hoped to deal with minority groups.Less

Denouement

in Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters

By the sixteenth century, the Jews had revised their perception of Christians. The Catholic Church had to permanently keep Judaism apart from the living Jews, and this it did by expanding ... More

By the sixteenth century, the Jews had revised their perception of Christians. The Catholic Church had to permanently keep Judaism apart from the living Jews, and this it did by expanding ghettoization. As a result, it was able to sustain its vision of “carnal Judaism,” achieve ecclesiastical purity, and avoid pollution initiated by contact with Jewish impurity. The ecclesiastical bulwark became possible because of blood libels, accusations of ritual murder, and Host libels, the perpetual vision of the corrupting Jew. By the later decades of the twentieth century, however, the ecclesiastical bulwark eventually gave way to thinking like that of the modern Bollandists. Such thinking also did not succeed completely; this can be attributed to the fact that St. Paul's vision of Christian (social) oneness in Christ through the wine and the bread remains the core of Christianity, and especially Catholicism.Less

Geographies of Ghettoization: Absences, Presences, and Boundaries

Tim Cole

in Hitler's Geographies: The Spatialities of the Third Reich

This chapter situates ghettoization within Nazi imperial plans for the east, exploring the ways in which ghetto fences separated off Jewish and non-Jewish space. In part, ghettoization functioned as ... More

This chapter situates ghettoization within Nazi imperial plans for the east, exploring the ways in which ghetto fences separated off Jewish and non-Jewish space. In part, ghettoization functioned as act of removal and 'clearing' which created judenfrei territory for ethnic Germans within a rewriting of the urban and rural landscapes of the East. But ghettoization also entailed concentration of Jewish populations within segregated living quarters in urban centers - the creation of Jewish presences (and not only absences). The chapter explores the profound spatiality of ghettoization as a way in to examining shifting Nazi intentions and Jewish and non-Jewish experiences.Less

Introduction

Meijer Roel and Edwin Bakker

in The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe

The introduction deals especially with prejudices against the Muslim Brotherhood, which is often seen as a threat to European values, and with the accusation that the organisation is inherently ... More

The introduction deals especially with prejudices against the Muslim Brotherhood, which is often seen as a threat to European values, and with the accusation that the organisation is inherently malevolent. It delves into the many debates that have been held on the Brotherhood in France, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.Less

Introduction: The School of Criticism I Wouldn’t Be Caught Dead In: A Polemic on Theorizing the Field

Benjamin Schreier

in The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History

This book explores how Jewish American literary study has alienated itself—in the form of insiderism, trivialization, and ghettoization—compared to American studies and ethnic American literary ... More

This book explores how Jewish American literary study has alienated itself—in the form of insiderism, trivialization, and ghettoization—compared to American studies and ethnic American literary formations. It examines the lines of relation and mutuality between Jewish American literary study and those institutional establishments from which it persists in isolation, such as American studies, multicultural and multiethnic studies, critical theory, and Jewish studies. It also considers the Jewishness that anchors the field of Jewish American literature specifically and Jewish studies more generally, along with multiple and often discontinuous histories and agents accounting for the field's ghettoization. The book employs a literary critical concept of Jewishness to reveal the history, meaning, and power of Jewish identity and articulates a concept of particularity for the study of identity that is neither positivistically opposed to some ontological concept of universality nor grounded in what is inevitably nationalized and biologized ethnic self-evidence.Less

“The world is a ghetto”: Post-Racial America(s) and the Apocalypse

Patrice Rankine

in The Trouble with Post-Blackness

This chapter examines global contexts of blackness by focusing on hip-hop and ghettoization. It analyzes Charles Taylor’s thoughts on secularism, hip-hop, and his own institutional setting in order ... More

This chapter examines global contexts of blackness by focusing on hip-hop and ghettoization. It analyzes Charles Taylor’s thoughts on secularism, hip-hop, and his own institutional setting in order to confront blackness in a career change that brings into relief the ways in which the boundaries around spheres called “personal” and “political” are nebulous indeed. It also considers the post-racial rhetoric of Touré’s America which he articulated in his book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?. In particular, it discusses Touré’s claim that there is no suffering, no despair, no existential angst—for that matter, no white flight, no racial conservatism, and no remnants of laws and practices that, in the case of America, divided a nation. Finally, it discusses Howard Winant’s unearthing of the roots of race through historical sociology and Houston A. Baker Jr.’s treatment of race.Less

The Racialization of Space: Family Housing and Anti-Ghettoization Policy

Lauren Stokes

in Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany

This chapter examines how the state used the housing market to regulate family reunification. The state required candidates for family reunification to have “sufficient housing” but largely failed to ... More

This chapter examines how the state used the housing market to regulate family reunification. The state required candidates for family reunification to have “sufficient housing” but largely failed to act against landlords who charged foreigners more than Germans. The state also reacted to the development of “foreign” neighborhoods on German soil with a national policy declaring certain cities and neighborhoods off-limits to further foreign settlement. This policy was in effect nationally from 1975 to 1977 and in West Berlin from 1975 to 1989. Both policies placed the burden of dispersal and “integration” on migrant families seeking to navigate a hostile housing market. Migrants unable to find state-approved housing often resorted to registering in false addresses or otherwise misrepresenting their living circumstances, placing many in the situation of being “residentially illegal” and thus vulnerable to deportation.Less