Close to Home: Suburbanization,Residential Segregation,and Jewish-Black Relations in St. Louis Park and North Minneapolis,MN

Abstract

This study examines the suburbanization of Minneapolis’ Jewish community during the postwar period, focusing on the ethnic enclave of North Minneapolis and the Jewish ethnoburb of St. Louis Park. It argues that as part of this process, Jewish leaders adopted a strategy of self-discipline, in which they would go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that instances of Jewish racism and other actions that threatened the community’s White, middle-class, and liberal image did not become public knowledge. Minneapolis Jews’ liberal ideology and self-disciplinary practices clashed with the increasingly public and confrontational tactics of the city’s Black liberation movement, facilitating a series of conflicts between Blacks and Jews in the neighborhood during the late 1960s. Jews, conditioned by postwar liberalism not to see how institutional racism affected their Black neighbors, interpreted these conflicts through the same lens they had applied to their experiences with prewar anti-semitism.