Book Review

Canada and the United States

Wendell Pritchett has written a remarkable social and political history of Brownsville, a section of eastern Brooklyn, that will set the pace for all future analyses of the ghetto. It demonstrates that a great deal may be learned about American history in general by looking at the past century through the lens of communities like Brownsville. The author compares Brownsville not only to the Lower East Side but also New York City to Chicago and Detroit. Not the least of Pritchett's comparisons is the one between the early Jewish community in Brownsville and the more recent African American and Puerto Rican communities there.	1
In 1861, real estate speculator Charles Brown bought land in the area and named it Brownsville. Brown developed some shacks to attract Jews from Manhattan, and industry soon followed. Within a few decades Brownsville had changed into "a dense neighborhood of tenements holding the largest concentration of Jews in the United States" (p. 10). Pritchett has written a compelling study of the changing racial, ethnic, and class dynamics in Brownsville since the 1880s. Brownsville was born as a Jewish working-class tenement community, lower in socioeconomic status than the Lower East Side; by the 1960s it became a black and Latino community, stigmatized as one of the poorest ghettos. The class conflict that shaped the political, social, and cultural life of the early Jewish ghetto established the foundation for the struggles of African American and Puerto Rican activists in the 1960s and 1970s.	2
Avoiding "culture of poverty" and "underclass" misconceptions, Pritchett shows a vibrant working-class culture articulated in the originally Jewish immigrant community. In the early twentieth century, Brownsville was a center of socialist activity, including the Brownsville Labor Lyceum. That lecture hall was not only the Socialist Party headquarters but also a political and cultural center for the working-class community providing music, theater, and political education. The Brownsville Labor Lyceum hosted important socialist speakers such as Norman Thomas and A. Philip Randolph. Pritchett reports that before the 1919 Red Scare, the Brownsville Socialist Sunday School attracted a thousand students weekly. The socialist movement in Brownsville also boasted a cooperative bakery, a bank, a consumer league, and tenant organizations. Thus, Brownsville became an immigrant Mecca in the early twentieth century.	3
The progressive political culture that infused those early socialist experiments was a living force in Brownsville throughout most of the century, and the established political parties paid attention, because they wanted to undermine the strength of the radical tradition in a working-class stronghold that was electing socialists like Abraham Shiplacoff to the New York state assembly and the New York board of aldermen. A key leader in this maneuver was Hymie Schorenstein, "the first Jewish Democratic District leader in Brooklyn." During the Palmer Raids, the government raided the Brownsville Labor Lyceum and arrested several members of the Socialist Party. When workers reelected several socialist assembly representatives, the legislature not only removed them from office but also (with Schorenstein taking the lead) "gerrymandered Brownsville into three separate assembly districts to weaken the power of the socialists" (p. 38).	. . .