Moving Up and Moving Out

CLASS DISTINCTIONS, BLOCKBUSTING, AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

As first and second-generation Jewish Americans, our narrators were encouraged by their immigrant parents and grandparents to pursue education and to strive for social, economic, and professional opportunity. Even as they remembered their formative years in urban neighborhoods, many spoke of Jewish middle-class families moving to suburban communities—part of a wave of assimilation and aspiration. In some cases, particularly in Dorchester and Roxbury, this movement also represented an uneasy exodus from changing neighborhoods that had once been strongholds of Jewish immigrant life.

Hear about Moving up and moving out

Elaine Kellem Baskin, age 13, at the seaside in1948. Image Courtesy of Elaine Baskin.

“I think it was an injustice, really, to enforce ... redlining.”

Stone Family at Graduation, undated; Elihu Stone papers; P-555A; Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at NEHGS, Boston, Mass.

Robert Feinberg. Courtesy of Robert Feinberg.

“[In] Dorchester, we were all the same. ... we were all Jewish, we were all first-generation Americans, we all had Yiddish-speaking relatives.”

“[Jews] were just not feeling as comfortable in the area. And, I think they were starting to want to assimilate more into the general population.”

“Like many people of my generation ... the future was elsewhere.”

“Some of the more affluent people from Dorchester would move to Brookline or Newton. Those who were less affluent would move to—let’s say you were in Chelsea, so you would move to Peabody.”