Once a ghetto, always a ghetto? This seems to be the major thesis of Wendell Pritchett's work on one of East New York's better known neighbors, Brownsville or The Ville. Pritchett contends that, from its earliest days, Brownsville was looked down upon by New Yorkers and city officials and treated as a "lost" neighborhood, unworthy of rescue. Consequently, Brownsville suffered from a lack of civic attention (funds, municipal services, middle income public housing, etc.), was unable to maintain a middle class population, and, due in part to poor recreaction spaces/opportunites for youth, had high rates of juvenille deliquency. In other words, the residents, Jewish or African American, became victims of the external view of their neighborhood and found themselves caught in a self-perpetuating loop of "ghettoization." Hence, the subtitle of the book: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto.In adopting this thesis, Pritchett ignores the very careful distinction made by Philpott: there is a difference between the slum and the ghetto. The Jews of Brownsville may have lived in a slum, which they could and did leave as soon as they were economically able. The African Americans of Brownsville lived in a ghetto, confined and defined by their race. However, the need to categorize both groups as "ghetto" residents is essential to Pritchett's thesis. To do so, he must rely on the idea that both groups shared a similar type of discrimination.
Proving that the Jewish Americans of Brownsville were unlike other white ethnics, therefore, becomes central to Pritchett's thesis. This accounts, in part, for his heavy-handed portrayal of the Brownsville's Jews as more liberal and open to racial change than other whites. In order to make this point, Prtichett fails to truly address what may be central to why Brownsville "remained" a "ghetto": Much, if not most, of Brownsville's Jewish population responded to racial change in the same way as many other urban white ethnics. Instead of remaining in Brownsville, despite the poor conditions, increasing violence, and diminishing quality of education, and working to make it a middle class, integrated neighborhood, they abandonned the area, participated in racist gang warfare, and were generally dismayed by the state of public housing and neighborhood schools. Pritchett, though, ignores these factors in order to concentrate on the exceptions rather than the rule.
But, perhaps that is the point. Ethnic historians have continunally treated Jewish Americans as different than other white ethnic groups, due in general to their liberal politics and their own history of discrimination. This, in turn, has led to the stereotype of Jews as passive and accepting (and even supportive or encouraging) in the face of neighborhood change, setting them apart from their aggressive, racist, Catholic counterparts. However, this stereotype does not account for what happened in Brownsville nor does it account for the development of the Maccabees and the Jewish Defense League (JDL). Both of the latter are treated as fringe groups, engaging in atypical or "non-Jewish" behavior. Yet, Pritchett and others demonstrate that neighborhood violence and organized gangs are the product not of ethnicity or religion, but of economic conditions.
All of which brings us to East New York. The gangs become "Italian" because they are expected to be Italian, even though the Jewish Americans and other European groups accounted for more than half of the neighborhood's white population. Jewish Americans, according to Pritchett, simply couldn't have acted that way.
