Ghetto Versus Shtetl
As I warned, the Jewish community’s lead for intervention in Darfur is not being received with widespread kudos or support many expected.
In a follow up post by fellow Jewschool contributor, deitybox, Mobius referred to my earlier post and to me as a “Ghetto Jew� in his editorial note at the end of the post.
This might sound similar to the casual reader as when some of the Zionist boys over at Jewlicious refer to me as a “Shtetl Jew.�
Bu it is not the same, though there are certainly some similarities, such as a preference for a traditional, and yes, cautious, Diaspora approach as an important consideration when crafting Jewish communal policy, with concern over precedent, arrogance, and overreaching.
But Jewish ghettos were massive centers of cultural and Intellectual power in major metropolitan areas, not minor ones. And they still are. Mobius may be pigeon holing me a little, but it is not without merit, and it is not dismissive in the same way as “Shtetl Jew,â€? which is meant to suggest a world view that is not only small town and small minded–and of course, weak–but also antiquated, and quite over.
Shtetl implies Eastern Europe, and of course, the dead language of Yiddish. But ghettos are the traditional strongholds of Diaspora intensity. They preceded Yiddish life, and they live on today. The ghetto is not static or for the history books, but a vibrant continuum. There are Jewish ghettos all over New York, with varying levels of religiosity, and they continue to thrive in many major metropolitan areas throughout the Diaspora.
So I’m soooo ghetto.
I’ll wear that label like a bochur wears a borsalino on a shidduch at a swanky Manhattan hotel lobby.
3 comments
A few pretty serious nitpicks: Yiddish is not a dead language. There are sizable and rapidly growing Hasidic communities in Brooklyn and Israel where Yiddish is very much a dynamic vernacular.
Secondly, “But ghettos are the traditional strongholds of Diaspora intensity. They preceded Yiddish life, and they live on today”: This understanding of Jewish history can be dated to Simon Dubnow, a Russian Jewish historian who wrote most of his work from 1907 until his death at Nazi hands in 1941. I’m a big fan of Dubnow, but his history is dated. The Jewish ghetto is a fact of modern history. Yiddish predates it–it’s been around since about the 15th century, when Jewish Germans immigrated en masse to Poland. The portrayal of Ashkenazi Jews as ghettoized belies the great amount of economic and social interaction between Jews and Gentiles. Just look at Moshe Rosman’s “The Lord’s Jews” to see a world (17th/18th century Poland) where Jews spoke Yiddish but ghettos did not exist. Or look at the Shulkhan Arukh–the prohibitions against eating or drinking with Gentiles clearly spurs from a real rabbinic anxiety about intermarriage and intermingling.
Finally, the shtetl is what you make of it. You say it “is meant to suggest a world view that is not only small town and small minded–and of course, weak–but also antiquated, and quite over.” The shtetlakh are gone, but that does not mean that we cannot embrace what they were and root ourselves in their traditions. I deny the view that the shtetlakh were “small-minded”: take a look at Boyarin and Kugelmass’s “From a Ruined Garden” to see a shtetl world that was very much involved in international politics, from Zionism to Communism or the Bund. Were they “weak”? Perhaps they were. I celebrate that weakness, if “strength” is the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people.
The shtetl and the ghetto are what you make of them. Instead of denying one and embracing the other, we must approach them from an honest historical perspective, and then use them as we wish to inform our own contemporary Jewish identities.
PS I saw on Jewlicious that you lived on the Lower East Side. Me too. Where do you go to shul?
PPS Do you think of the Lower East Side as a ghetto? I do not: doing so would deny the reality of the Dominican, Chinese, Italian, and other communities that live side by side with the neighborhood’s Jews.
Mr. Hersch,
The term ghetto goes back much further, to the early exile in Italy, and the dense neighborhood where the Jews were allowed to live.
I do not live on the Lower East. CK meant that culturally, because of my affection for the area’s history, and because I used to work for Yonah Schimmel’s Knishery.
If I did live there, I would go to Eldrdige St. and perhaps the Stanton St. synagogues.
As a proud Boroparker, I want to get a t-shirt made up that says something like:
who you calling “ghetto”?
u r b a n s h t e t l , n.y.c.
BOROUGH PARK, BROOKLYN
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