Are New York’s Jews opting for more Judaism or less? Is their Jewishness nothing more than bagels and lox, or is the growing visibility of ultra- Orthodox communities an indication of future trends?

In 1946 a young Jewish veteran, Aaron Frankel, returned from the army to Manhattan’s Upper West Side only to discover that the fashionable Jewish neighborhood where he had grown up no longer felt like home, despite its Judeocentricity. “What had I come back to?” Frankel asked in an essay in Commentary that year.

 

Self-Imposed Boundaries

Frankel had returned not only to the most Jewish city in the United States, but to what he called the “most compact and prosperous Jewish community in the city of New York.” At mid-century, Eighty-Sixth Street was the epicenter of New York’s Jewish world. Yet for Frankel – as for many Jewish veterans – the Upper West Side felt stifling, its concerns parochial. “Eighty-Sixth Street Jews still feel themselves in exile,” he wrote. “Perpetually they fret that they do not yet ‘belong,’ and are not yet ‘accepted.’” Increasing acceptance and integration of Jews and Judaism in America in the late 1940s and 1950s made veterans self-conscious about what felt like the self-imposed boundaries of Jewish neighborhoods. In the army, Jews had found that “if they made no point of being special, or different, neither did anyone else.” Thus, many Jewish men rejected segregated Jewish life in urban enclaves like New York. In fact, some posited that living such cloistered lives might actually cultivate Jewish insecurity. “Can it be that our sense of the Jewish Problem is induced as much by our narrow manner of living as by external pressure?” Frankel worried that his coreligionists had not so much left the ghetto as “transformed and gilded it.”

While Frankel considered demonstrably Jewish neighborhood his parochial and stifling, it in fact represented progress. When Jewish refugees arrived in New York in 1654, its anti- Semitic governor, Peter Stuyvesant, wanted to keep them out. Although Stuyvesant’s Dutch superiors overruled him, he restricted Jews from building a synagogue and demanded that they practice their religion only at home. Thus, although the city’s (and the country’s) first congregation, the Spanish and Portuguese Shearith Israel, was founded in 1654, New York Jews secured the right to worship in public and open their first synagogue only in the 18th century.

New York’s second-oldest synagogue, the famous B’nai Jeshurun, was founded in 1825 as an Ashkenazic breakaway from Shearith Israel. In 1829, Ansche Chesed (now a large, Conservative synagogue on the Upper West Side) splintered off from B’nai Jeshurun. By 1835, New York had four synagogues; by 1845, there were ten; and by 1855, over twenty. The desire to maintain unity no longer restrained congregants from expressing dissatisfaction, and the need to attract new members further motivated congregations to adjust their practices. In the mid-19th century, Reform Judaism was introduced to New York as young  German immigrants sought to add more dignity and decorum to the synagogue. The desire to win greater Jewish respectability among non-Jews in New York inspired many new Jewish leaders and movements as well.

Congregational autonomy became the new norm for New York Jews, and a monolithic American Judaism was replaced by numerous synagogues and styles of worship. As no single synagogue represented the New York Jewish community, community wide organizations were established to transcend the differences. Meanwhile, a democratic and diverse American Judaism thrived.