A large part of history is reserved to irony. One of the great ironies in the history of Portland’s Jewish community is how the destruction of South Portland, the Jewish quarter by the bulldozers of urbanrenewal symbolized also a freeing and “whitening” of the Jewish population, even as they smashed one of the city’s richest cultural enclaves.

Old South Portland, OJM Collection

Portland was hospitable to its earliest Jewish population, mostly because they were Germans who were already assimilated by dress and manner to European ways. But the Eastern European and Sephardic Jews arriving in Portland in the last years of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries found a different reception. They were, owing to their orthodox religiousness, their strange accents and dress, truly aliens. Thus they were, by their own inclination and because of their poverty and inability to assimilate quickly into the mainstream economy, ghettoized in South Portland. Although discrimination was mild, they were not invited into mainstream society and so moved in their own social circles, had their own business networks, and built their own cultural organizations. Their lives rarely intersected with those of the larger society.

When Portland’s first urban renewal project began in 1959, South Portland was home to the Jewish Community Center, five synagogues, and the Neighborhood House. On First Street, there were kosher delicatessens, meat markets, and bakeries. For its mostly aging residents, 700 of whom were over sixty, it was neighborhood in the classic sense with a functioning, if informal, social support network to help the elderly survive. Calls for gradualism in attacking the blight city fathers found there were ignored and, in less than a decade, the area was transformed, eradicating its Jewish character.

The displacement of the older South Portland Jews was traumatic, but for their children
It was much easier. Many had already left—physically and emotionally--migrating with others of their generation to the suburbs to live assimilated middle class lives, even though many of the better neighborhoods to which they moved had restrictive covenants. Although it may seem like their journey from city to suburb was the result of a natural progression, it was a complex and by no means assured development. Indeed, South Portland’s children achieved the transition following World War II by a process some scholars call whitening. This was a complex change in which mainstream American society began to perceive Eastern European Jews as white, in contrast to their parents, who were definitely not regarded as members of the white race. This process was not an exclusively Jewish phenomenon, but the Jewish experience typifies it.

One key to the whitening process was World War II itself. Before the war, on naturalization forms immigrants filled in both race and color. Thus, a Jew filled in “Hebrew” for race and “white” for color. But by the beginning of the war, the distinction collapsed because of the repugnant racism of the Axis states and immigrants began to list themselves under race simply as white. Eventually, the government revised the form so that the only possible answer for race by whites—whether they formerly would have answered “Hebrew,” “Irish,” “Hungarian” or “Armenian”—was now, in fact, white. This change came about as a result of government directives, so it was actually a policy shift, not just popular usage.

Another factor following the war was the threat posed by the Soviet Union to the United States. Though the US emerged from the conflict as the greatest power, Soviet belligerence suggested that the world remained a dangerous place for America. Most subscribed to the view that internal solidarity minimizing differences was better for the country than division in the face of the Russian menace. An aspect of this idea was the success of the 1955 of the best seller by Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in Religious Sociology. In it, Herberg posited not one melting pot, but three—one for each group--saying that each, through intermarriage and assimilation, had found three different ways to be American. These three different paths were, he asserted, the three pillars of American society. The vast popularity of the concept indicates how in one small book Herberg was able to confer on Jews full citizenship status based on about a 4 percent representation in the total population.

Jews were also whitened by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Israel, an American ally, was embedded in the heart of the Middle East, a region increasingly hostile to the US during the Cold War era and perpetually in play in the competition with the Soviets. One historian writes that Israel “became of ideological necessity and by the imperatives of American nationalism, a white client state. This revision was popularized not only in mainstream journalism, but in Technicolor extravaganzas on Middle Eastern history of the fifties and sixties like The Ten Commandments and Exodus.”

Perhaps more than any other factor, the difference in the status of Jews in the last half of the twentieth century was a result of the GI Bill of Rights, embodied in the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944. By any measure, the GI Bill was the most significant tool for the creation of middle class persons in US history. The GI Bill might not have spurred as many Americans to go to college after the war as the mythology associated with it would have us believe, but it did have a major impact on occupational training, which was a critical element of the GI Bill’s offerings to returning servicemen. Most important, it changed the popular conception of the accessibility of the middle class to ordinary people. Before the war, college had been part of upper middle class life, not something accessible to average Americans. It was not regarded as helpful to ordinary people, because most jobs required no post-secondary education. Young Jewish servicemen took full advantage of the educational opportunities offered by the GI Bill and catapulted into the professions-- law, medicine, accounting, and teaching--and other jobs requiring post-secondary training. They also borrowed money through it to buy suburban homes. We know this law conferred substantial advantages on Jews because returning African American servicemen suffered systematic discrimination by the Veterans Administration. The comparison of the ensuing economic and social trajectories of the two groups shows the boost the GI Bill gave Jews.

The loss of South Portland as the epicenter of Jewishness was a grievous, if temporary, blow to the community’s sense of identity. Still, its demise marked the passing of an era of apartness for the majority of Portland’s Jews and the beginning of one in which they became full participants in their own city.

For Further Reading:

Abbott, Carl, Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). Contains a thorough discussion of the mechanics and consequences of urban renewal in Portland, especially as it relates to South Portland.

Brodkin, Karen, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). A personal narrative and scholarly analysis
of growing up Jewish on Long Island in the postwar suburban world.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). A historian argues that race is a social, political, cultural, and economic construct and, as such, allowed “successful” immigrant groups to be “reracialized” as Caucasian over the course of the last 100 years.

Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). The impact of the suburbs on the development of American society since World War II.

Johnston, Robert, the Radial Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). An examination of early 20th century Portland politics with much to say about local attitudes toward race and ethnicity.

Lopez, Ian F. Haney, White by Law: the Legal Construction of Race (New York: NYU Press, 1996). A path breaking discussion of the precedents in American law for the racial identity of many groups in society.

Moore, Deborah Dash, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004). An exploration of the impact of World War II service on young Jewish soldiers, by one of the leading scholars of the new Jewish history. See also by the same author, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L. A. (New York: Free Press, 1994).

Toll, William, the Making of an Ethnic Middle Class: Portland Jewry over Four Generations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). The best book about 20th century Eastern European Jewish settlement and inculturation in Portland.