The Urban and Suburban Landscape of Jewish Identity in Baltimore

• In Event: Urbanism, Urban Jews and Jewish identity: part 2, Qualitative Research and Social History

Abstract

The revival and restructuring of urban landscapes documented by Ehrenhalt in The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City is creating a changing landscape for Jewish identity. While generation, education, marriage, family patterns and social networks have been highlighted in research on Jewish identity, the places of home and work are changing as well. The Jewish population in Baltimore, once geographically concentrated in adjacent suburban neighborhoods, has become dispersed. The dispersed clusters of Jews have different social characteristics and different relationships to the metropolitan area. The paper identifies these clusters, particularly the urban clusters that contrast with the conventional view of Jews as suburban, and relates them to structural economic changes occurring in the Baltimore area. The paper discusses emergent challenges to Jewish cohesiveness in this landscape and further identifies Jewish institutional responses to this geographic fragmentation.

author

• Stuart Schoenfeld, Glendon College, York University