Five Books I Recommend About: Washington Heights and Inwood

I devoted most of last week to reading other historians' research, which was a nice change of pace from trying to write my own. I thought it might be nice to share some of the books that have helped me make sense of events in the Jewish community of Washington Heights and Inwood after World War II. 

1. Steven M. Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-1983, Its Structure and Culture (1989)

One of the most distinctive features of Washington Heights' during the 1940s through 1970s was the presence of a large German refugee community. These escapees from Nazism, who arrived en masse to Washington Heights between 1938-40, balanced a trio of identities: German, Jewish, and American. In Frankfurt on the Hudson, Lowenstein argues that the refugees' adjustment to America was of a dual nature. Like the wave of Eastern European Jews who immigrated between the 1890s and 1920s, these German Jews coped with being a Jewish minority among a Christian majority. In addition, they had to cope with being an ethnic minority within the Jewish community because their German customs differed from the Eastern European majority in Washington Heights. Lowenstein's description of how, exactly, these refugees adjusted to America is vivid and--if you skim over the more dense discussion of his surveys--would be of interest to a lay reader who wanted to learn more about this particular Jewish experience.

2. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (2008)

This book focuses on another immigrant community in Washington Heights, those who migrated from the Dominican Republic to New York after 1965. Dominicans differed from the German-Jewish refugees because they had the option of returning to the Dominican Republic (and they often took advantage of opportunities to travel back and forth). Hoffnung-Garskof examines the influence of this transnational migration, and A Tale of Two Cities asks how the Dominican national identity evolved as a result of the regular movement of its citizens between the DR and the United States. This might be a difficult read for those who dislike social science theory, but Hoffnung-Garskof's book is well written and includes many engaging stories; a lay reader could skim the text for these excellent narrative nuggets.

3. Robert W. Snyder, Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City (2015)

This BRAND NEW publication traces the history of northern Manhattan from the New Deal to the present. Snyder argues that despite tense relations between the many ethnicities and races represented in the area, residents of Washington Heights and Inwood were able to bond together often enough over the biggest issues (housing, crime prevention, parks preservation) to sustain the neighborhoods through the urban crisis. As entire blocks of the Bronx burned just across the river, residents and activists in Washington Heights forged tenuous but effective coalitions to improve their schools, protect their blocks, and hold police accountable for their actions. Snyder writes like a journalist, and Crossing Broadway is almost entirely devoid of theory. It's the perfect book for any amateur historian of New York City.

4. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (1981)

City Trenches is an essential book for anyone studying the history of Washington Heights. It is, however, a dense book, and I would recommend brushing up on Marxist theory before sitting down with it. Katznelson argues that instead of breaking down and reshaping urban politics, the minority-majority of Washington Heights was boxed into the traditional "trenches" of machine politics. Black and Latino resident-activists did not achieve their radical aims of integration and equality during the urban crisis because the city's political structure of community boards pushed their complaints down to the local level where big, systemic changes like housing reform and public school funding could not be resolved. The result was to force community activism into the mold of old-school ethnic politics, where each ethnic or racial group competed for the few gains possible within the scope of their limited power.

5. Eric C. Schneider, Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York (2001)

The title of this book is as colorful as the cast of young men and women that it studies. Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings is not exclusively about Washington Heights--there are also case studies about youth gangs in Hell's Kitchen and the Lower East Side--but one of the best chapters is about a brutal murder in Highbridge Park in 1957. Schneider's writing is very accessible and the book is narrative-driven, making it a great read for a general audience. 

If anyone has other recommendations, I would love to hear them! 

Stress Dream

A few weeks ago I began having stress dreams. I was never a particularly active dreamer until last year, and I still find them disconcerting. Recently they have reflected reality to a degree they never did before. Now my anxieties follow me from wakefulness into sleep, which can be exhausting. The silver lining, I guess, is that I get up some mornings with a certain clarity about how to prioritize my work. 

For example, last night I dreamed that I was in Washington Heights. I was sitting in a swiveling desk chair at the corner of 181st St. and St. Nicholas, by the entrance to the 1 train, and I was eating cold french fries out of a plastic bag. I found the fries underneath the chair when I sat down. I swiveled the chair back and forth, to the left and to the right, watching New Yorkers walk by on their way to work and school. It was obviously morning, which makes my choice of breakfast seem even more peculiar and suspect.

All of a sudden my friend walked by and we greeted each other. I politely extended the bag I was eating from and offered him some cold fries. He wisely declined. I asked him what he planned to do on this fine day. I can't recall what he answered but he did mention it was Thursday. 

I jumped up. Thursday!? If it was Thursday it meant I had a 9 AM appointment to do a follow-up oral history interview. I demanded that my friend tell me the time. It was already 9:48 AM! I had to get uptown!

I thanked my friend and ran down into the subway station. I only had to go two stops and I silently prayed that I could get there by 10:00 AM. I saw a train in the station, but I couldn't dig my Metrocard out of my bag fast enough and so I watched it pull away. I knew that if I walked to the furthest end of the platform and got in the first car of the next train, it would get me closer to the exit at my destination. As can only happen in dreams, bookshelves and tables and racks appeared as I walked farther along. Obviously the northernmost section of the uptown platform was a bookstore. There are worse places to wait for the train, I guess. 

That's when I realized that I was going to the oral history interview without my digital audio recorder. I decided that the recorder app on my phone would suffice. Once I resolved that problem, I remembered that I had not written any questions for this interview. Why not? I hadn't finished transcribing the past one, and so had not decided on my follow-up questions. As I contemplated my situation, a train finally pulled into the station. I somehow had the gumption to get onboard, convinced that I could wing it without my interviewee noticing.

My alarm went off about then, and I immediately advanced transcription to the top of my to-do list. Unlike Dream Me, Awake Me is not denial. I cannot wing anything.

Inactivism

I met my friend Ben last May, when I started volunteering with a group that protests against mass incarceration and the American prison-industrial complex. We became friendly while working together to assist a formerly-incarcerated member of the group find employment and deal with his legal affairs (as best we could). I became less involved with the group as my doctoral exams drew near, but Ben and I continued to hang out. We now have a regular Sunday ritual of brunch followed by a few hours of binge-watching HBO dramas (first Ben showed me Game of Thrones, and now I'm showing him The Wire). 

While I cannot overstate how much I enjoy watching TV with Ben, I most value the conversations we have before and after the show--while digesting the meal or the episode we just watched. Our discussions are far-ranging. We take turns as each other's therapist and catch up on the past week. Ben teaches me about home repair, sculpture, and lion dancing. I show him my knitting projects and tell him all of the funny things that my partner's students (first graders) have said lately. We also talk a lot about activism, advocacy, privilege, vulnerability, and the awkwardness of race and class and gender.

This past weekend, I expressed to Ben that I feel lost, self-absorbed, useless... I can't figure out how to insert myself into the important conversations nor how to participate in the hard work of making change. I just sit at the computer, avoiding interaction, completely absorbed in the academic bubble in which I live. My activities are circumscribed to two square miles of Pittsburgh's East End, where everyone has a Masters degree and a MacBook. 

This conversation was spurred by an encounter my partner and I had in Baltimore over Thanksgiving. After a grueling drive through snowy conditions, we decided that it would be most convenient to eat dinner at the bar adjacent to our hotel. Understandably, the place was slow the night before the holiday. We struck up a conversation with the bartender, who was generally a lovely guy with an interesting life story. The discussion segued to college, specifically paying for an expensive education. Within this context, the bartender made a comment that took us by surprise. Alluding to his own name, Israel, he remarked that it wasn't surprising that he was as stingy as the Jewish State. I regret that I did not respond with a gentle rebuke, but by the time I processed what he said the moment had passed. I never managed to put the right words together... it was said without menace, to build a bridge with humor, and I did not want to jump straight to accusations of anti-Semitism. This guy was tactless, not a skinhead. 

It was this element of the interaction that surprised me--why did he think it was something appropriate to say in unfamiliar company? I'm aware that anti-Semitism exists. It only takes quick review of any comments section in a major newspaper to find yourself inundated with this kind of deeply hateful speech. Even though it's pervasive on the internet it has been a long time since it affected me in my non-digital life, and I more commonly find myself in situations where I have to courteously refuse an appeal to convert to Christianity. The last incident I recall was from middle school, when my parents took me with them when they went to buy a new car. During the negotiation, the salesman told my father to "stop Jewing him down." Needless to say, we did not buy a car from him. Living in the South, though, anti-Semitism was not particularly shocking. There are four churches within a mile radius of my parents' house (and that's only along the longitudinal radius).

Over the past decade, I've lived in two cities with large Jewish communities and have predominantly orbited within academic circles. Without even trying, I somehow spent the two years between college and graduate school working for a Jewish university. I can't seem to escape! The result has been that no one I come into contact with would make this comment. Either they would find it offensive, or would recognize that inevitably someone within earshot would find it abhorrent. 

The bartender's tactless remark made visible the boundaries of my social life, and it bothered me to discover that what I perceived as a welcome mat was actually a moat with the slimmest of drawbridges. I shared my dismay with Ben. I told him that although I regretted this predicament, I felt like it was also how I kept myself sane. I don't have the energy to write a dissertation and fight the good fight; I don't want to meet new people so that I can dispel them of their -isms. I felt--and still feel--like a big hypocrite. I judge but do not act. 

Ben and I have had similar conversations in the past, about philosophies of activism and the tension between self-preservation and advocacy. Ben patiently listened while I unloaded all of these thoughts and feelings on him. I did not really expect any sort of resolution, just sympathy, but his response really resonated with me. He said that I should not discount the value of asking the questions, of seeking answers, of empathy and openness. Action happens on the foundation of learning, and Ben reminded me that it's not a cop-out to spend time thinking the big thoughts. 

This insight reminded me of a quote I found recently in one of my documents. I noticed it because of how it was used to support an argument against Jewish Centers, but I read it very differently after reflecting on Ben's response to my nagging insecurity.

“Learning, education must not be equated with a curriculum we complete upon graduation. No one ever thinks that entertainment is a stage in one’s life which is completed once a person has passed the test of being entertained. The meaning of existence is found in the experience of education. Termination of education is the beginning of despair. Every person bears a responsibility for the legacy of the past as well as the burden of the future.”

— Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel (March 27, 1960)

Heschel was the epitomal scholar-activist, and made this statement during a speech he gave in 1960 at a White House Conference on Children and Youth.  It appears to be a simple argument, but there are a lot of ideas packed into this short paragraph. What exactly did Heschel mean by despair and why does he see it as the foil to education? And why is the future necessarily a burden? Couldn't it be an opportunity? And goodness, what to make of the meaning of existence?

I spent a lot of time trying to unpack the depth. I was most confused about the fourth sentence, "Termination of education is the beginning of despair." What exactly are these two states, and how do you distinguish the before and after? I usually associate despair with sadness and heartbreak. Did Heschel believe learning was a romance of the mind? Probably not, but that thought reminded me that despair evokes how you feel at the end of a relationship. If we understand education to be the practice of building connections and relating one idea to another, the end of learning would be despair; like the break up of a partnership, learning stops when there is no longer any effort made to forge a connection. Despair implies futility, a future that no longer warrants the work needed to build it. 

For Heschel, then, an education was not an end-state. Education was the means to an end, specifically a future of possibilities and opportunities. Herschel argued that a meaningful human existence carried the responsibility of learning how the present came to be, so that decisions can be made about the future. 

I find comfort in these words. Education is a commitment required of citizenship in a democracy, and knowledge is the glue that binds an individual to a community. I research the past so I can make informed choices in the present. I seek what I do not know so that I can better understand the people closest to me and those separated from me by color, class, gender, sexuality, or by the passage of time. I educate myself in order to be an educator, and it is my responsibility to share my knowledge in the classroom, in conversation, in my writing. Ben (and Heschel) helped me to see action and engagement in my solitary, sedentary pursuits. No effort is wasted, and when I am ready to help bear the burden of the future I will do it with the strength I built during this time of questioning and exploration. 

Getting a Good Read on the Situation

I struggled to get out of bed this morning. I partially attribute this to the darkness of the early hour, and partially to intimidation. I have a long to-do list this week! I let a few tasks simmer on the back burner over the past two weeks while I focused on a time-sensitive project. I'm excited to get moving on a few of these tasks, like planning my travel for January through April. Inherent in planning this travel, however, is deciding what I will research, and where, and for how long. So many choices!

Although my heart's true desire was to spend the entire day in bed playing Bejeweled on my iPad, I declared today a dedicated reading day. Reading seemed like a decent compromise between productive efficiency and total evasion of responsibility. Reading is the most inert activity in my profoundly sedentary profession, and it's like green eggs and ham: you can do it in a bed, you can do it on a couch, you can sit stiff as the dead, or bend over in a slouch. 

The first three years of graduate school are heavily weighted towards reading, with a side of writing. Coursework in history usually demands you read a book a week per course. Preparing for doctoral exams forces you to read a book a day for about five months straight. After that, you read on an as-needed basis.

I've really struggled with incorporating reading into my life as a dissertator. I started out slow, and introduced fiction back into my routine. I rationalized that it would be easier to muster enthusiasm for stories about vampires than for stories about the past (though sometimes those interests combined in magical ways). Now that I'm getting further into the dissertation research, though, I recognize that I have to keep up with the history books (and articles) on the subjects I'm writing about. I'm finding it hard to switch gears from reading documents to reading a book, especially because I prioritize the former activity. I try to devote my most productive morning hours to the mountain of evidence that I'm digging through, and by the time I'm done it's hard to concentrate on a book. The consequence of this is that I haven't done much reading lately....

So, what is the point of this story? It's just a reminder to myself that a day spent supine is not a day wasted, as long as there's a history book in my hands. 

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I'd love to hear other researchers strategies for tacking between research, reading, and writing! Do you have any personal rules or self-imposed structures for finding this balance?

Thanksgiving

Today I am thankful for: my beloved friends and family, my witty partner, my wise professors and advisors, my dynamic colleagues, my former coworkers (from whom I've learned so much), the historical profession, writers of transporting fictional works, coffee growers and ethical coffee sourcers, database software designers, high definition cable television, and everyone in the past who saw value in what they wrote and produced and saved every scrap of paper and donated them to archives so that we in the present can understand the contours of their lives and learn from the choices they made, the responsibilities they felt, the repercussions they faced...

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