Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed

by Gerald H. Gamm

Across the country, white ethnics have fled cities for suburbs. But many have stayed in their old neighborhoods. When the busing crisis erupted in Boston in the 1970s, Catholics were in the forefront of resistance. Jews, 70,000 of whom had lived in Roxbury and Dorchester in the early 1950s, were invisible during the crisis. They were silent because they departed the city more quickly and more thoroughly than Boston's Catholics. Only scattered Jews remained in Dorchester and Roxbury by the mid-1970s.

In telling the story of why the Jews left and the Catholics stayed, Gerald Gamm places neighborhood institutions--churches, synagogues, community centers, schools--at its center. He challenges the long-held assumption that bankers and real estate agents were responsible for the rapid Jewish exodus. Rather, according to Gamm, basic institutional rules explain the strength of Catholic attachments to neighborhood and the weakness of Jewish attachments. Because they are rooted, territorially defined, and hierarchical, parishes have frustrated the urban exodus of Catholic families. And because their survival was predicated on their portability and autonomy, Jewish institutions exacerbated the Jewish exodus.

Gamm shows that the dramatic transformation of urban neighborhoods began not in the 1950s or 1960s, but in the 1920s. Not since Anthony Lukas's Common Ground has there been a book that so brilliantly explores not just Boston's dilemma but the roots of the American urban crisis.

Genres: History, Religion

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 1999

About the author

Gerald H. Gamm is an associate professor of political science and history at the University of Rochester. He served for 12 years as chair of the political science department. Currently, his research focuses on Congress, state legislatures, and urban politics. Gamm is the author of two books: The Making of New Deal Democrats (University of Chicago Press, 1989), and Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Harvard University Press, 1999).

Reviews

[John Tocci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding academic analysis for anyone interested in the history of Boston. Analysis of the cultural, political, economic and racial forces that shaped the city, and particularly Roxbury and Dorchester. Should be paired with Death of an American Jewish Community.

[Zach Church · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting examination of Jewish and Catholic communities in Dorchester and Roxbury from late 19th century through most of the 20th century. While the author essentially hammers on his central thesis - this is academic in character - the particulars were so unknown to me that it read as a history as much as an ethnography.

Now that I've read it I'd like to go see some of the Catholic churches discussed, as well as the few remnants of the Jewish communities that have long since left. Not exactly Common Ground, but a must-read for anyone with an interest in Boston history.

[Patrick]

Skimmed and jumped around through this, and learned a nice bit about Dorchester and white flight, and the different patterns of Jewish and Catholic life in the neighborhood in the last century.

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is about my neighborhood, so I felt compelled to read it, but it's such a dull read! Intense details about Catholic and Jewish institutions and very little about actual people. It's about White Flight, but doesn't have much to say about Black people. Interesting maps, but very few photographs.
Overall disappointing.