Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community

By Sean Martin, John J. Grabowski, Sylvia F. Abrams and 10 more

This volume gathers an array of voices to tell the stories of Cleveland’s twentieth century Jewish community. Strong and stable after an often turbulent century, the Jews of Cleveland had both deep ties in the region and an evolving and dynamic commitment to Jewish life. The authors present the views and actions of community leaders and everyday Jews who embodied that commitment in their religious participation, educational efforts, philanthropic endeavors, and in their simple desire to live next to each other in the city’s eastern suburbs. The twentieth century saw the move of Cleveland’s Jews out of the center of the city, a move that only served to increase the density of Jewish life. The essays collected here draw heavily on local archival materials and present the area’s Jewish past within the context of American and American Jewish studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978809956

Book preview

Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community

Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community

Edited by Sean Martin and John J. Grabowski

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Martin, Sean, 1968–, editor. | Grabowski, John J., editor.

Title: Cleveland Jews and the making of a Midwestern community : edited by Sean Martin and John J. Grabowski.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018933 | ISBN 9781978809949 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978809970 (web pdf) | ISBN 9781978809956 (epub) | ISBN 9781978809963 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Ohio—Cleveland—History. | Cleveland (Ohio)—Ethnic relations.

Classification: LCC F499.C69 J5425 2020 | DDC 305.8009991/32—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018933

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2020 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2020 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

For Alan D. Gross

Contents

Foreword

Stephen H. Hoffman

Introduction: Cleveland and Its Jews: New Perspectives on Communal History

Eli Lederhendler

Chapter 1. A Link in the Great American Chain: The Evolution of Jewish Orthodoxy in Cleveland to 1940

Ira Robinson

Chapter 2. Jewish Philanthropy in Cleveland to 1990

David C. Hammack

Chapter 3. Abraham Hayyim Friedland and the Context, Structures, and Content of Jewish Education

Sylvia F. Abrams and Lifsa Schachter

Chapter 4. Everyman vs. Superman: Harvey Pekar, Comics, and Cleveland

Samantha Baskind

Chapter 5. Ethnic Identity and Local Politics: Abba Hillel Silver as a Community Leader and International Politician in Cleveland, 1940–1950

Zohar Segev

Chapter 6. She Will Be the Mary Poppins We Have Been Searching For: The Rise of Feminism and Organizational Change in the Cleveland Section of the National Council of Jewish Women

Mary McCune

Chapter 7. Trepidation, Tolerance, and Turnover: Jewish-Black Relations in Cleveland Neighborhoods, 1920–1960

Todd M. Michney

Chapter 8. Jewish Suburbanization and Jewish Presence in the City without Jews

J. Mark Souther

Chapter 9. Suburban Temple and the Creation of Postwar American Judaism

Rachel Gordan

Chapter 10. People-to-People: Cleveland’s Jewish Community and the Exodus of Soviet Jews

Shaul Kelner

Afterword

Sean Martin

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Index

Foreword

Cleveland has a reputation as a very generous city in America. This has been even more true of Cleveland’s Jewish community. But beyond money, Jewish Clevelanders have been influential in shaping key movements in nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish history.

This collection is an attempt to capture some of these historical dynamics. Some of the chapters reflect Cleveland’s take on stories that unfolded across Jewish America. Others are unique insights into Cleveland Jewry’s special perspective on events.

The Jewish Federation of Cleveland is grateful for the contribution of each of the authors and in particular to the roles played by Sean Martin, John J. Grabowski, Sally H. Wertheim, and Alan D. Gross in bringing this book to life.

Jews by inclination and tradition are a historical people. I hope these chapters will feed that natural appetite to know our past so we may learn how to innovate to meet twenty-first-century challenges.

Stephen H. Hoffman

President

Jewish Federation of Cleveland

INTRODUCTION

Cleveland and Its Jews

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON COMMUNAL HISTORY

Eli Lederhendler

It is local history that can show American Jewish life as it has been lived. . . . Local communities, not national organizations, hold the real power in American Jewry.¹

—Lloyd P. Gartner

This volume offers readers a fresh look at a significant American community—Cleveland, Ohio—from the vantage point of one of its subcommunities: the Jews.

Cleveland’s Jewish population is fairly representative of Jewish communities in the United States, reflecting as it does the proportional size, status, and lifestyle characteristics of the Jewish population within American society at large. Typical of the lives of many other American Jews, the metropolitan environment in which Cleveland Jews live is socially complex and heterogeneous, characterized by the substantial presence of other minority populations and immigrant and ethnic groups.² Thus a treatment of Cleveland’s Jewish community emerges from—and is wholly engaged with—concerns regarding wider questions of cultural and social diversity, economic viability, intergroup relations, urban and suburban interactions, and religious pluralism. Even though this book is focused on one group, foregrounded for particular analysis, the implications of these targeted studies certainly invite further discussion and comparative perspectives.

For the general study of ethnic group behavior in urban and metropolitan American social spaces, this volume offers a rich variety of specific insights that flesh out the implications of the phenomenon that has been dubbed ethnoburbs (or ethburbs). While these designations have frequently been deployed by scholars investigating Asian American urbanism and suburbanism as well as in general for visible minorities, we have in the present instance a rare case of a white ethnic minority group that defies the regnant patterns of most of the Ellis Island ethnics, as Bruce Phillips has pointed out. Moreover, while the ethnoburb model has provided conceptual tools to understand the suburban experiences of first-generation immigrants in contemporary America, the history of Jews in postwar Greater Cleveland extends the model by focusing on an ethnic minority with a relatively small first-generational cohort. Moreover, the chapters in this volume pursue themes that have emerged in other recent studies of Jews in Midwestern American metropolitan communities, such as Lila Corwin Berman’s study about Detroit. A study based on the Jews of the Cleveland metropolitan area fits, therefore, within an emergent field of social research.³

Like most other American Jews, the Jews of Greater Cleveland tend to cluster in concentrated residential pockets rather than disperse randomly. The approximately eighty thousand Jews living in the area as of 2011 are a small segment of the local residents and number about 3 to 4 percent of the area’s overall population. This proportion is about double the national percentage of Jews in the United States. That statistical overproportion is a reflection of Jews’ above-average metropolitan concentration compared to the United States population at large. In the early twentieth century, Jews represented about 10 percent of the local population, but the continued demographic changes of the city until the 1970s, the preference of many Jews for larger cities, and the gradual drifting of Jewish populations toward the south and west have combined to reduce Jews’ share in the Greater Cleveland area to its present level.⁴

Like many other American Jews, the socioeconomic profile of Cleveland Jews is mainly middle to upper-middle class (16 percent live on under twenty-five thousand dollars a year; 46 percent earn between twenty-five and seventy-five thousand dollars a year; and 38 percent are in higher income brackets). Roughly two-thirds of them are Ohio-born residents (57 percent hail from Greater Cleveland), the rest having been born elsewhere in the United States or abroad (6 percent from the former Soviet Union). Despite the influx of newcomers, there has been no net population growth over time: the estimated Jewish population in the Greater Cleveland area has not changed since 1996. By the same token, however, Cleveland Jewry has not shrunk in absolute numbers in tandem with the recent slight decline in the overall Greater Cleveland population.⁵

The activity of various Jewish agencies devoted to religious, welfare, and social services offers ample evidence of a pool of resources, differing motivations, and social engagement with both fellow Jews and others. These features of communal life attract a substantial part of the Jewish public at any given time. Two-thirds say they typically donate money to Jewish causes; 42 percent of Jewish households report synagogue membership, down from 52 percent since 1996; and about 18 percent are affiliated with a Jewish Community Center or another Jewish organization. About half the Jews affirm, when asked, that they regard being part of a Jewish community to be personally very important.⁶

There are, evidently, some discrepancies here, implying that the subjective belief in the value of community outstrips actual affiliation behavior, that synagogue membership is widely (though not universally) considered a stand-in for other kinds of community affiliation, or that in the minds of some people, community may not necessarily mean membership in institutions and organizations. Jews in Cleveland, as elsewhere, are diversified internally by their different family histories, religious beliefs, political outlooks, and habits of self-identification. One local resident suggested to me that the Jewish Federation of Cleveland projects a strong public presence, which she sees as a reflection of how many Jews identify with being Jewish. At the same time, she believes, synagogue attendance and religious observance are less in evidence among the non-Orthodox majority of the population.⁷

Cleveland’s Jewish communal history has attracted the attention of a number of different scholars and commentators over the years. One of the most elaborate—and still one of the best of its genre—was the pioneering study by the distinguished late historian Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Cleveland (originally written in the early postwar years, published in 1978, and republished a decade later). Gartner’s research took him only up to the end of the Second World War, leaving the postwar years and more recent decades to later scholars.⁸

The postwar period had, in fact, been briefly sketched in the early 1960s in a book about Jews in urban America.⁹ Cleveland, one of the top ten most populous U.S. Jewish communities, was featured (with deliberate irony) as the City without Jews. The label referred to the fact that an overwhelming majority of Jewish residents had left the city of Cleveland only to regroup in rather compact enclaves in its eastern suburbs.

In 1978, the year that Gartner’s History was first published, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland issued a photographic history of the city’s Jewish life, entitled Merging Traditions. That book, unlike Gartner’s, also included the years from 1945 to 1975. The title of the final chapter, Moving Farther East, confirmed what had been written during the previous decade about Jewish deurbanization in Cleveland.¹⁰ The ironic epithet, the City without Jews, had apparently struck a raw nerve. Revised and republished in 2004, the Jewish Federation–sponsored volume retained a vigorous riposte to the still-rankling description, declaring that "to an outsider Cleveland may seem like a ‘city without Jews’ (emphasis mine). For those who lived there, the text averred, the suburbs were very much a part of the larger Cleveland community, which was said to be confident of its place in Northeast Ohio, the nation, and the world.¹¹ Indeed, the City without Jews episode is recalled yet again in two of the chapters in this volume, written respectively by Todd Michney and Mark Souther. Claims on behalf of the Jews’ continued civic involvement are certainly well founded, and they accord with analogous developments in other cities, which historian Lila Corwin Berman has dubbed a politics of remote urban activism" (as mentioned by Souther).¹²

A demographic survey conducted by the Jewish Federation in 2011 confirmed the continued decline of Jewish residence in older and more central areas of Greater Cleveland and a significant transition to the eastern (Beachwood and Solon) and southeastern suburban zones. Residential areas to which Jews are attracted are characterized generally by high-income households, a very low percentage of poor residents, a large majority of white residents, substantially higher levels of high school and academic attainments than the Ohio average, the amenities of low-density living, and a solid majority of married-couple households.¹³ This pattern of continuing suburbanization, it should be noted, differs somewhat from the renewed urbanizing trend that has been observed among both younger Jews and seniors in a number of other American cities.¹⁴

One purpose of this book, therefore, is not merely to revisit some of the older history of Cleveland’s Jewry but to fill out, adjust, and revise some of the memories of the past, as recorded in the Jewish community’s self-portrait and its photographic archive, and to connect them more directly to contemporary social studies. Although the individual topics are specific and diverse, they add up to a composite that allows for generalizations. Contemporary issues in Cleveland can now be read back into previous eras, as in the chapter by Michney on relations between Jews and blacks in Cleveland from 1920 to 1960 and in Souther’s chapter on suburbanization and urban persistence.

Complicating the aim of arriving at an overall picture, we note that the primordial categories of identity and Jewishness that served Gartner so well in his day are today open to question. Conventional terms like religion, ethnicity, and community must be carefully parsed. For instance, one must now take into account mixed-religion households, in which there is a non-Jewish partner. Such households accounted for 38 percent of married couples in the Cleveland Jewish community study in 2011 (as compared to just 23 percent in 1996). Children raised in such households live in a variety of family cultures, including those with a Jewish orientation (33 percent), those with no orientation to a particular religious identity (23 percent), those with a mixed orientation (Jewish and something else, 22 percent), or a non-Jewish orientation (7 percent).¹⁵

It has, indeed, been queried whether in our day there exist any quintessentially Jewish characteristics that serve uniformly as a yardstick for Jewish community life. Some observers take this identity deconstruction quite far, suggesting that Jews actually share little in common with each other apart from one thing and one thing alone—they identify as Jews, whatever that may mean.¹⁶ This radically skeptical position privileges an uncompromisingly individualistic and elastic social model over models that would allow for acknowledged social boundaries and collective social embeddedness. A glimpse into this more individualistic, less institutionalized version of American Jewish identity is offered by Samantha Baskind in her chapter on the comics author and graphic novelist Harvey Pekar. On the whole, however, the other chapters in this book use a more straightforward standard of mainstream or core Jewishness based on a combination of kinship and religious affiliation.

Figure I.1. Civil Subdivisions, Cuyahoga County, 1995. (Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University)

This volume explores the challenges and complexities of a large and diverse community in the interest of providing a revised historical and social portrait. The model of plural and loosely combined subgroups, implicit in these chapters, points substantially beyond the model of community in the singular—and I believe that it points even beyond the usual observations about fabled, perennial disagreements within any Jewish society. Internal divisions, after all, have always existed among Jews. American Jewry, being no exception to the general rule, is famously subdivided into streams and movements and often fraught with intense internal debate. Usually this is touted by the Jews themselves as evidence of democracy and pluralism. Gartner’s historical canvas, readers might recall, contained a record of the fractious segmentation that seemed to plague Cleveland Jewry in its populous heyday. But in his telling, this history of friction and partisanship actually provided the motivation to construct an overarching, multipurpose community for multiple constituencies, in which differences would shade into the woodwork. In the final analysis, Gartner’s History was unmistakably a portrait of a collective entity, metaphorically reminiscent of a boisterous extended family.

When seen in such a light, Zohar Segev’s chapter on Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver’s career in Zionist politics in the 1930s and 1940s, both in Cleveland and beyond, seems to second Gartner’s construct. Segev portrays Silver, one of the most prominent American rabbis in his day, within a context where Jewish identity markers were taken more or less for granted and where something like a consensus about core Jewish interests was conceivable. For example, Segev reminds us that Silver took the notion of a Jewish vote at face value, quite seriously entertaining the notion of parlaying Jewish electoral postures into political leverage. Silver’s view of the ballot as a tool to be wielded in the interest of ethnic politicking strikes the reader as far removed from today’s political discourse (though, even without bloc voting as a strategy, Jews and other demographic groups are still regarded as displaying typical voting profiles at election time).

That notion of Jewish communal solidarity seems to be firmly rooted in the history of the 1940s. By 1945, as Gartner was describing the immediate postwar scene, the long-standing divisions between various wings of the community were healing, the population’s economic hardships of the interwar years were easing, and tensions between old-stock and new-stock Jews had, as he put it, mostly disappeared. He even ventured the opinion that the age of harmony that seemed to be dawning made some people—frequently they were the youth—look wistfully upon the two generations of issues and conflict in Jewish life which had ended.¹⁷

The ideal of collective unity thereafter retained currency among Cleveland’s Jewish communal leaders. Sidney Vincent, a paragon of community-building and one of the authors of the aforementioned, programmatically entitled Merging Traditions, described Cleveland’s postwar Jewish community as diverse yet unified.¹⁸ The 2004 reedition of that volume confessed that internal disagreements . . . occur naturally within a very diverse community but opined that efforts to assuage such differences were afoot.¹⁹ Gartner’s ostensible age of harmony, it seems, has taken a long time in arriving, and the upshot may be something more akin to an age of autonomy. That is something worth pondering. Do Jews, clustered together spatially, catering to their own needs via voluntary associations they establish and pay for, constitute a social entity whose overall sum is greater than its individual parts? Or are they merely a set of loosely conjoined enterprises, over which an activist but ultimately sectoral leadership is (still) attempting to assert a grander vision?

Could the more cohesive notion of community, informed by and supportive of a collective identity, have been inherently tied to highly specific locations—such as a city block, a compact neighborhood, and a close-knit web of face-to-face relationships? If so, does the expanding topography of suburban sprawl tend to loosen and even derail a city-bred sense of intimacy (along with its fraternal squabbles, snubs, and competitiveness) conjured by images of past generations? Does suburbanization rather promote a new array of locale-based relations? Of potential interest here is the following comment on the nature of suburban culture and particularistic interests, with particular reference to matters of religious behavior in America: In terms of professional sports teams . . . , suburbanites tend to think of themselves as Clevelanders or Philadelphians. In terms of schools and municipal services . . . the suburbanites identify with their own smaller communities. . . . Religious life, with few exceptions, falls in the localized sphere of activity involving the families, schools . . . , care for church friends, and personal development.²⁰

Yet despite this idea of fragmentation, the sense that several authors in our volume convey is that community as a subjective experience and as a social construct is not limited to personal, local, and spontaneous ties. Mary McCune, in her chapter on the nature of innovative organization among women, illuminates this very point. The example she provides suggests that association, mutual support, and commitment can be deliberately cultivated among people who possess few if any prior, face-to-face relationships. Her analysis of the activities of the Council of Jewish Women echoes, in that respect, something that the American anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell has written elsewhere about the innovative communal energy that percolated through postwar Jewish suburban communities. Arguing against a simplistic lament over the ostensibly thin social resources at the disposal of stereotypical suburban communities, Prell proposes instead an appreciation of dynamic cultural processes, contestation, and even pioneers.²¹

Jewish life in the postwar Cleveland–based community certainly retained its sectoral character and its individualism. Disagreements, separations, and jostling for resources occurred as distinct interest groups sought to create space for themselves within the larger fabric of Jewish life. Rachel Gordan’s chapter on the formation of Suburban Temple, a breakaway congregation of Reform Jews, affords a good example of this. She sheds light on how members’ dissatisfaction with existing Jewish school models played an essential role in defining a new constituency among younger Jewish families.

The history of Orthodox Jews in America generally and Cleveland in particular (already partly adumbrated in Gartner’s History as well as in Merging Traditions), receives fresh and more detailed attention in this volume. Jewish Orthodoxy is a subject that has received limited attention (with rare exceptions) outside the parochial confines of Jewish historical and social studies and Jewish media.²² Even within American Jewish scholarship, it has not played a particularly central role, given the minority status of Orthodox Judaism within the wider field of American Jewish life. Reform temples in Cleveland and their nationally known rabbis featured prominently in the earlier histories of Cleveland Jewry. Indeed, during the Great Depression, the careers of these rabbis, who functioned as public intellectuals, continued to flourish even amid a kind of spiritual Depression in terms of congregation size and vitality.²³ In the postwar history of Cleveland, in contrast, attention has shifted to the growing importance of the Orthodox Jewish sector. The chapter by Ira Robinson surveys and documents the issues of integrationist versus separationist religious institutionalization, highlighting the responses aroused in the larger Jewish sphere by Orthodox exclusivism on one hand and by internal Orthodox debates and fractional conflicts on the other.

Additional examples of sectoral perspectives and their potential for new activism appear in Shaul Kelner’s chapter on Soviet Jewry advocacy. Kelner notes that this focus for new activity originated in the mid-1960s in a fairly marginal sector of Cleveland’s Jewish community and gained wider traction only by stages. It also becomes clear that in the matter of helping ex-Soviet Jewish émigrés resettle in Cleveland, organizations and institutions have provided much wherewithal to the resettlement effort but have been less effective in grappling face-to-face with individual dilemmas and solutions. The latter, over time, came to depend on the grassroots, personal input of immigrant families themselves, who have emerged as a new subcommunity in their own right.

In that sense, these chapters elaborate on the point that leadership can be the product of dissent, differentiation, and individual effort as much as (or even more than) the outgrowth of a larger organization or consensus. The volume brings together a variety of themes and individual histories in a format that seems more in keeping with the notion of a multiplicity of initiatives and experiences than a centralistic projection of coherency.

Migration, Americanization, and Beyond

The narrative of immigration, resettlement, and Americanization is part and parcel of the extant literature on Jewish communal history in the United States. Frequently, local communal histories function as memory tapestries, striving to interweave two important threads: the outer history of how local Jewries have found their place in the public life of their towns and cities, and the inner, inter-generational narrative of separation from the old country and adaptation to new patterns of life. Previous examples of Cleveland Jewish histories have all been typical of this genre.²⁴ In its way, Sylvia Abrams’s and Lifsa Schachter’s chapter, recounting the life and times of the Hebrew educator Abraham Hayyim Friedland, is also a portrait in miniature of this dual perspective. It delineates one man’s quest that begins at the most personal level and ends up illuminating the vicissitudes of immigrant adaptation in a wider communal framework.

Is the Jewish experience in Cleveland a refraction of the larger shifts and developments in the city and the region at large? That may be taken as almost axiomatic—American Jewish urban and posturban experiences can never be limited to a narrow-gauge focus on the exemplary institutions and patterns of the Jews’ ethno-religious otherness. Never having been sequestered from public life at large (a point already made in Gartner’s study), whatever is Jewish in a more particularistic sense is at the same time a feature of a wider, more complex panorama of society and culture. That which is properly fraternal—bound together by formal and informal associational ties—is likely to coexist cheek-by-jowl with the anecdotal and individual; what city life is like at its richest, subjective level. The chapter by Samantha Baskind mentioned previously draws upon the life of one of Cleveland’s popular-culture heroes. Exploring the ways in which this is not just but also a Jewish story, Baskind follows Pekar’s experiences, which are, in the end, about family, kinship, and memory.

At another level, the chapter on philanthropy by David C. Hammack tackles the question of voluntary support for Jewish institutions and, almost in the same breath, the parallel support offered by Jews on behalf of general civic improvement, institutions, and projects. Similar in its double-barreled attention to a Jewish-based organization involved in general social change is McCune’s aforementioned portrayal of Jewish women’s activism in Cleveland.

The chapter by Michney on race relations in the interwar and early postwar periods again shows how a general issue becomes the template for a consideration of Jews’ social involvements at various civic, economic, and political levels. Specifically, this chapter also raises interesting points about the loop connecting the massive shift of Jewish residents away from their former neighborhoods; the concurrent influx of Black homeowners, tenants, and employees into pockets of former Jewish residential concentration; and the relocation and retooling of Jewish community facilities in the face of new demographic realities. In this loop, there is no clear way to disengage the particularly Jewish concern with community affiliation from the general issues of a changing urban demography. The issue of community therefore is implicated in the context of intergroup boundary formation; this is reinforced by reading the chapters by Michney and Souther in tandem. The discourse surrounding community erosion and institutional rebuilding and the relationship between these and larger demographic issues in Cleveland, including racial issues, is analyzed here at length.²⁵

Where might we go from here? is the implied question that lingers after reading the chapters in this volume. Immigration, Americanization, and integration into the wider civic realm are paradigmatic issues that do not necessarily reside wholly in the past: witness the data cited at the outset about foreign-born members of Cleveland’s Jewish community today, and especially the data regarding community members from the former Soviet Union. Their stories, although briefly touched upon in Kelner’s chapter on the Soviet Jewry movement, await future study.

Of related interest is the fact that domestic migration continues to characterize the demographics of community life. This applies not only to the patterns of suburbanization discussed in this volume but also to community emigration and immigration, neither of which has received attention here. The Jewish population report written several years ago showed that it exhibits a mix of Cleveland area–born residents (slightly more than half of the Jewish total) with those from out of town and out of state. The community’s changing profile, in turn, becomes a factor in the quality and character of communal institutions, their attractiveness to residents, and their agendas.

Given the instability and flux of economic and professional opportunities in America generally and in the Cleveland vicinity specifically, we might want to know more about the selective processes by which the Jewish population is constantly altering. Studies suggest that relocation may occur more than once in a lifetime; that such moves are anticipated as part of a life course; that intrastate and interstate domestic migration rises along with rising academic and professional qualifications (college graduates and those with graduate degrees); and that women hold a slight edge over men in their rates of relocation independent of their academic attainment levels. Furthermore, data show that intrastate and interstate relocations can be a factor in retarding active participation in community, religious, and other social networks. Still, locations with higher concentrations of Jewish residents tend to retain higher percentages of those who live there to begin with or of those who move there. In addition, in-migrants who persist in their new homes over time (at least a decade) are apt to begin behaving as their more rooted Jewish neighbors do with respect to Jewish practices and belonging.²⁶

Mention has been made throughout these chapters of individual and collective activism. The topic is relevant to many of the initiatives that galvanized the collective life of Cleveland Jewry, just as it is pertinent to the interface between the Jewish community and the larger urban environment. There is basic information that has yet to be researched in this regard, however. It would be interesting to know, for instance, what kind of role business leaders in the Jewish community have played in Cleveland’s urban renewal and community development projects.²⁷

An urban-based community, Cleveland Jewry is also part of a regional and interregional (indeed, global) set of concentric circles. Chapters in this book such as Segev’s portrait of Abba Hillel Silver, Kelner’s report on advocacy for Soviet Jewry, and McCune’s analysis of women’s activism all point beyond local matters to political movements and trends in America and around the world.

The rationale behind volumes about local history militates against overgeneralizing the particular, since it is in their very specificity that they achieve what general histories frequently overlook. At the same time, one might readily imagine a comingling of the local community genre with a set of comparative regional or cross-regional studies involving other Ohio communities, other midsized metropolitan Jewries, or other, non-Jewish neighbors in Greater Cleveland (religious, immigrant, racial, and ethnic groups).

This volume takes an important step toward promoting more elaborate research strategies in the future. The Jewish community of Greater Cleveland offers ample scope for addressing a variety of issues in social history. The scholarly attention that it attracts—and has attracted over time—affords readers a rich perspective on contemporary Jewry in a changing America.

NOTES

1. Lloyd P. Gartner, Metropolis and Periphery in American Jewry, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 1:341.

2. City-Data.com, accessed March 20, 2018, http://www.city-data.com/races/races-Cleveland-Ohio.html; Robert L. Smith, Asians, Hispanics Populate Latest Wave of Northeast Ohio’s Newcomers, Plain Dealer, accessed March 20, 2018, http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/04/asians_hispanics_populate_late.html; cf. Jeffrey S. Lowe, Limitations of Community Development Partnerships: Cleveland Ohio and Neighborhood Progress Inc., Cities 25 (2008): 40.

3. Lila Corwin Berman, Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Bruce Phillips, Not Quite White: The Emergence of Jewish ‘Ethnoburbs’ in Los Angeles, 1920–2010, American Jewish History, 100: 1, 73–104; Wei Li, Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018); Shuguang Wang and Jason Zhong, Delineating Ethnoburbs in Metropolitan Toronto, CERIS Working Paper Series no. 100 (April 2013), accessed July 5, 2018, http://www.torontolip.org/Portals/0/Resources/General/Delineating%20Ethnoburbs%20in%20Metropolitan%20Toronto.pdf.

4. Jewish population data cited from the 2011 Greater Cleveland Jewish Population Study, conducted by Jacob B. Ukeles, Pearl Beck, Ron Miller, and David Dutwin; accessed February 20, 2017, from the Berman Jewish Data Bank, http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Studies/downloadFile.cfm?FileID=2813. Cf. American Jewish Year Book, 108 (2008): 206, table 1: Jewish Population in the United States, 2008. Jews enumerated in Greater Cleveland in 2011 actually represent an overcount by some 2,500: college students not living in the Cleveland area at the time the data were gathered were included in the survey anyway as members of Cleveland households. In 2010, the five-county Cleveland-Elyria Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) had a population of 2,077,240 (down slightly from 2000 figures). United States Census Bureau, Metropolitan and Micropolitan, accessed March 20, 2018, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/metro-micro.html. For figures showing the relative loss of Jewish residential population in the eastern northcentral states over the period between 1930 and 1990, see Sidney Goldstein and Alice Goldstein, Jews on the Move: Implications for Jewish Identity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 38–39, table 2.2.

5. 2011 Greater Cleveland Jewish Population Study, Berman Jewish Databank, accessed March 20, 2018, http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Studies/downloadFile.cfm?FileID=2813. In 2015, the City of Cleveland reported that the median per capita income for the Cleveland metro area was $29,859. Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor Household Income, Department of Numbers, accessed March 20, 2018, http://www.deptofnumbers.com/income/ohio/cleveland/. Forbes reported the median household income in the Cleveland metro area in 2016 as $50,722. The Best Places for Business and Careers, Forbes, accessed March 20, 2018, http://www.forbes.com/places/oh/cleveland/.

6. 2011 Greater Cleveland Jewish Population Study, Berman Jewish Databank, accessed March 20, 2018, http://www.jewishdatabank.org/Studies/downloadFile.cfm?FileID=2813.

7. Personal communication with the author via email, November 23, 2016.

8. Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Cleveland (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society