Listen now | We can as well rename the podcast to “The Jews,” since we can’t stop talking about them (us). This week we first talk about the country life and our utter incompetence at it. The we go on and on about the Jews — mostly the ones in the Catskills where New York Jews used to spend their summers in their own little vacation ghettos until the 1970s, when they became “white” and joined the mainstream. That working class world is gone. Now a whole new wave of Jews is taking over the region: neo-trad religious types that are creating their own shtetls.
Love listening to you guys! My experience is more like Evgenia's grandfather- I grew up about 4 hours away from the city in rural upstate New York. Despite the natural beauty it was a pretty sad rustbelt town suffering from poverty & drug addiction/alcoholism. The decaying victorian homes & silence came to symbolize this depression to me, so I'd rather live in a tiny apartment on an avenue in Manhattan any day! It's funny to see so many city folk going up there, Hudson valley is much nicer of course, but I always think to myself, "I hope you like dollar general & the opioid crisis!"
Anyway, a lot of the poverty & depression in my childhood town came from the devastation that descended upon the dairy farmers (this was once the local industry up there) after factory farming became the norm. Yasha, if you ever want to do a Pistachio Wars-style documentary about what killed the dairy industry in Upstate NY let me know! Lots of bleak stories there...
I read with interest your comments - and older article - about the old Jewish world of New York.
This struck a chord with me, because it parallels and overlaps with a similar old Irish world of the same city. I even remember stories of the Irish immigrants going upstate to the Catskills (and the occasional wide-eyed - but good natured - accidental intrusions e.g. by a couple of Jewish girls into an Irish ceilidh). (One article in the NYT described it as "The Irish Alps": https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/nyregion/the-last-sweet-days-of-the-irish-alps-in-upstate-new-york.html )
A retired gentleman wrote a book a few years back on his own experience then - and on returning to live and work decades later, with both feelings of distance and resonance:
My family lived in one of those parishes in the Bronx... Highbridge was set high on a bluff with streets called Summit and Woodycrest reflecting its elevated location. Our neighborhood was friendly and working class in those days, with Irish and Jewish families and a sprinkling of Italian and German Americans. Men like my father went off to work in the transit, called the “railroad,” while others worked in the construction trades, the garment district or as policemen and firemen.
Jewish doctors held a special position in the Irish, Italian, Eastern European immigrant mix that went to make up much of the South Bronx. Catholic mothers-of-five could discuss matters with a Jewish doctor that couldn’t be mentioned elsewhere. Working men of the 1930s, often of socialist inclination, could seek character references for employment from the only professional dignitary they were likely to know, complete with personal letterhead paper, initials before and after their names, and a telephone number to boot. Dr. Kubel’s office served as a secular confessional in addition to a medical practice. He, and others like him, provided much of the adhesive that held together the disparate social structure of the South Bronx.
As a measure of how immigrant influence arrives and wanes in waves: I still have an old Sesame Street LP from when my Dad returned from a business trip to the US (1970s), which has a series of cartoon scenes on the cover - one of which has the stereotypical Irish cop with stage brogue. By contrast, just recently, the Irish Voice (NY) newspaper shuttered after decades: https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/irish-voice-print
I'm Irish-American, but grew up in Ireland, and so for me all the stories I heard from my Dad (and Mam, who moved to the US after he poached her on holiday), made the South Bronx and the "old world New York" you refer to - inverted to the usual experience - seem like it was my lost/found home-country. It really was a different world, with a different set of political possibilities (and yes, I know there's an element of romanticism - but there really did seem to be a possibility of both vigorous ethnic identity, _and_ political coalitions that just seem like a parallel universe today).
On a tangent from precisely that point: I'm reading Mark Fisher's 'Postcapitalist Desire', and one of his final lectures, touches upon this notion of periods (e.g. late 60s early 70s) where constellations of cultural and political forces combine to allow the imagining of actual alternatives to the status quo; of how these countercultures can become undermined, commodified as individualist poses and relics to be consumed.
The early 1970s seemed to be a real hinge of history, where - I'm not sure whether it's more appropriate to say "the Right" or just the Status Quo any more - undermines a popular progressive front; from about 1971-'73, there was a real switcheroo, economically, politically, culturally and socially - there's even a website noting the weird economics of it: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Surfing the seas of identity politics is never easy or for the bashful. Very interesting show delving into the questions that are usually met with blank stares and silence. Thank you for continuing to pinch the sacred cows.
If I may suggest, starting a Hasedic Hudson valley real estate boom is certainly one way to financial greatness, but I think starting your own cult, or even your own religion, is the pathway to heavenly riches. Just a thought.
Love listening to you guys! My experience is more like Evgenia's grandfather- I grew up about 4 hours away from the city in rural upstate New York. Despite the natural beauty it was a pretty sad rustbelt town suffering from poverty & drug addiction/alcoholism. The decaying victorian homes & silence came to symbolize this depression to me, so I'd rather live in a tiny apartment on an avenue in Manhattan any day! It's funny to see so many city folk going up there, Hudson valley is much nicer of course, but I always think to myself, "I hope you like dollar general & the opioid crisis!"
Anyway, a lot of the poverty & depression in my childhood town came from the devastation that descended upon the dairy farmers (this was once the local industry up there) after factory farming became the norm. Yasha, if you ever want to do a Pistachio Wars-style documentary about what killed the dairy industry in Upstate NY let me know! Lots of bleak stories there...
I read with interest your comments - and older article - about the old Jewish world of New York.
This struck a chord with me, because it parallels and overlaps with a similar old Irish world of the same city. I even remember stories of the Irish immigrants going upstate to the Catskills (and the occasional wide-eyed - but good natured - accidental intrusions e.g. by a couple of Jewish girls into an Irish ceilidh). (One article in the NYT described it as "The Irish Alps": https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/nyregion/the-last-sweet-days-of-the-irish-alps-in-upstate-new-york.html )
A retired gentleman wrote a book a few years back on his own experience then - and on returning to live and work decades later, with both feelings of distance and resonance:
My family lived in one of those parishes in the Bronx... Highbridge was set high on a bluff with streets called Summit and Woodycrest reflecting its elevated location. Our neighborhood was friendly and working class in those days, with Irish and Jewish families and a sprinkling of Italian and German Americans. Men like my father went off to work in the transit, called the “railroad,” while others worked in the construction trades, the garment district or as policemen and firemen.
https://www.irishcentral.com/new-york-irish-summers-long-ago
And my own Dad wrote:
Jewish doctors held a special position in the Irish, Italian, Eastern European immigrant mix that went to make up much of the South Bronx. Catholic mothers-of-five could discuss matters with a Jewish doctor that couldn’t be mentioned elsewhere. Working men of the 1930s, often of socialist inclination, could seek character references for employment from the only professional dignitary they were likely to know, complete with personal letterhead paper, initials before and after their names, and a telephone number to boot. Dr. Kubel’s office served as a secular confessional in addition to a medical practice. He, and others like him, provided much of the adhesive that held together the disparate social structure of the South Bronx.
https://www.irishamerica.com/2006/06/two-saints-a-surgeon/
As a measure of how immigrant influence arrives and wanes in waves: I still have an old Sesame Street LP from when my Dad returned from a business trip to the US (1970s), which has a series of cartoon scenes on the cover - one of which has the stereotypical Irish cop with stage brogue. By contrast, just recently, the Irish Voice (NY) newspaper shuttered after decades: https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/irish-voice-print
I'm Irish-American, but grew up in Ireland, and so for me all the stories I heard from my Dad (and Mam, who moved to the US after he poached her on holiday), made the South Bronx and the "old world New York" you refer to - inverted to the usual experience - seem like it was my lost/found home-country. It really was a different world, with a different set of political possibilities (and yes, I know there's an element of romanticism - but there really did seem to be a possibility of both vigorous ethnic identity, _and_ political coalitions that just seem like a parallel universe today).
On a tangent from precisely that point: I'm reading Mark Fisher's 'Postcapitalist Desire', and one of his final lectures, touches upon this notion of periods (e.g. late 60s early 70s) where constellations of cultural and political forces combine to allow the imagining of actual alternatives to the status quo; of how these countercultures can become undermined, commodified as individualist poses and relics to be consumed.
The early 1970s seemed to be a real hinge of history, where - I'm not sure whether it's more appropriate to say "the Right" or just the Status Quo any more - undermines a popular progressive front; from about 1971-'73, there was a real switcheroo, economically, politically, culturally and socially - there's even a website noting the weird economics of it: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
All the best,
Oisín
Surfing the seas of identity politics is never easy or for the bashful. Very interesting show delving into the questions that are usually met with blank stares and silence. Thank you for continuing to pinch the sacred cows.
If I may suggest, starting a Hasedic Hudson valley real estate boom is certainly one way to financial greatness, but I think starting your own cult, or even your own religion, is the pathway to heavenly riches. Just a thought.