Awards

• Nominated for Allan Sharlin Memorial Award 2000
• Nominated for J. David Greenstone Book Prize 2001

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780674005587

Table of Contents

Reviews

Gerald Gamm uses census data, parish and synagogue records and contemporary newspaper accounts to demonstrate both that Boston's urban crisis began decades before race was a factor, and that Jews and Catholics reacted differently because their religious life was governed by entirely different rules...To [a] class analysis of urban change Gamm adds the significant dimension of religion. - Mark Silk, New York Times Book Review This thoroughly reported and elegantly written book surely is the best interpretation of Boston politics since J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground. - David Warsh, Boston Globe

"This thoroughly reported and elegantly written book surely is the best interpretation of Boston politics since J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground in 1985. -- David Warsh * Boston Globe * Focusing on Boston's Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods from 1870 to the 1970s, Gamm argues that Jewish and Roman Catholic institutions and their white congregants responded differently to the changing urban environment. Correctly tracing the origins of the urban crisis to 1920s suburbanization, he concludes that Catholic and Jewish institutions' different rules, including those of membership, rootedness, and authority, accounted for these different responses...Urban Exodus is an interesting and challenging study. -- J. Borchert * Choice * Synagogues and parishes, Gamm contends, essentially dictated who stayed in Boston's neighborhoods, who left for the suburbs, when, and why. It's an intriguing argument, one almost provocative in its simplicity...Urban Exodus takes its place in an increasingly impressive collection of books on urban conflict from Los Angeles to Yonkers, which seriously consider the intricacies of geography (not to mention religion). To paraphrase that eminent Bostonian, Tip O'Neil, we're finally learning that a good deal of American history is local. -- Tom Deignan * Commonweal * Urban Exodus takes a fresh look at two long running themes in Boston history: tribalism and turf. It examines the glue that holds a neighborhood together. And it explains Boston's reputation as a city of distinct parishes, even in the wake of demographic change. -- Thomas M. Menino, Mayor of Boston Gerald Gamm has taken the question of the causes of racial succession in American urban neighborhoods, the subject of major works of urban sociology, into new fields with this book. His remarkably detailed and informed research into the character of two major American religions, and how they interact with the urban fabric, breaks new ground in urban sociology. It will have to be taken into account in any future discussion of why the American city seems incapable of maintaining stable neighborhoods. -- Nathan Glazer Gerald Gamm set out to solve a mystery--one that occurred in Boston, but is also a quite common event in other big cities. Why do the Jews abandon their old neighborhoods, while other (typically Catholic) urban ethnics are much slower to do so? He offers an ingenious answer centering on the ability of religious organizations to make credible commitments. The reader will find this a learned, sensible, and provocative argument, one bound to be controversial. The book is a model of clarity, of serious scholarship, and, frankly, of damned good detective work! -- Kenneth Shepsle, Harvard University Through vivid stories and carefully presented evidence, Gamm shows that religious institutions shape neighborhoods and affect patterns of urban change. He does this by telling the fascinating story of upheaval and change in Boston's twentieth-century Jewish and Catholic neighborhoods, with lessons for Sharon [Massachusetts] in the twenty-first century. * Sharon Advocate * Urban Exodus is more than a pioneering work in comparative sociology. It is also a thoughtful and challenging contribution to American Jewish history, and tells a story that occurred in Detroit, Washington, Newark, Cleveland, Minneapolis, New York, and elsewhere...According to Gamm...the difference between the demographic mobility of Jews and Roman Catholics stemmed from the different institutional structures of the two groups. As a result of a close examination of church and synagogue records, census data, newspaper accounts, Boston government records, and other primary source material, Gamm argues that ""what primarily distinguishes Jews from Catholics is not a different capacity for racist behavior but a different attachment to territory. Catholics have a strong sense of turf, regarding their neighborhoods as defended geographical communities. -- Edward S. Shapiro * American Jewish History * Throughout the book, Gamm follows the lives of two Dorchester institutions - St. Peter's, the largest preeminent Catholic parish, and Mishka Tefilan, Boston's oldest conservative congregation. Statistically and anecdotally, Gamm thoroughly demonstrates how divergent modes of governance affected Jews and Catholics as well. -- Paula M. Kane * Church History * This carefully written, impressively researched book begins with the puzzle suggested in its subtitle: Why did almost all of Boston's 70,000 Jews leave the neighborhoods of Dorchester and Roxbury for suburban destinations during the 1950s and 1960s…In its broad contours Urban Exodus persuades, and Gamm's achievement is noteworthy. He traces the life history of over one hundred Boston churches and synagogues, itself an accomplishment, and weaves them into a story of considerable power. -- John T. McGreevy * Reviews in American History * The great merit of Gerald Gamm's study of the Catholic and Jewish neighborhoods of modern Boston is that it carefully balances the forces, visible and invisible, which caused those groups to behave as they did. -- James M. O'Toole * Catholic Historical Review *"

Author Information

Gerald Gamm is Associate Professor of Political Science and History, University of Rochester.

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