Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

In the Ghetto: From Renaissance Venice to Chicago, Post-Trump

Princeton professor Mitchell Duneier came to town to talk about his new book, “Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea,” and sign a few copies. But certain events in the week preceding Duneier’s November 12 presentation, at the Chicago Humanities Festival, have added extra weight to a discussion about the nature of the ghetto.

Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump targeted Chicago as a hotbed of violent crime, particularly in what he called its “inner city,” comparing it to a “war-torn country” desperate for tougher police tactics. So perhaps it was not surprising that members of Duneier’s audience at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies would start thinking about the implications of the idea of the ghetto in their own city.

Since March 29, 1516, when the city council of Venice issued an edict that all Jews would have to live in a closed quarter called il geto, the idea of the ghetto, Duneier argues in his book, has vacillated between two positions: a place where people of a single ethnic group can “semi-flourish” although they’re cut off from the rest of the city; or a place of extreme social control.

In terms of Jewish history, the Venice ghetto was an example of semi-flourishing. The Warsaw ghetto was an instance of extreme social control. Some ghettos can be both: while African-Americans were confined to Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood by restrictive housing covenants, they did manage to establish businesses and create a rich culture within the neighborhood’s boundaries. In Black Metropolis, their great study of Chicago’s south side originally published in 1945, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton acknowledged this disparity by referring to the neighborhood as “the ghetto” when discussing its problems and “Bronzeville” when discussing its value as a community.

(Interestingly, Duneier discovered by scouring old newspaper archives that it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that “ghetto” was used to describe primarily poor black neighborhoods. Still, as early as the 1940s, after reading about the European Jewish ghettos, some black activists claimed, “We are America’s Jews.”)

It fell to Duneier’s interlocutor, Mary Pattillo, a professor of sociology at Northwestern and the author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City, to bring up the Trump question.

“I think he’ll appoint as attorney general [Rudolph] Giuliani or someone like him,” Duneier said. “He was the architect of stop-and-frisk. This is the way of thinking of the ghetto as extreme social control.”

This is also consistent with the way the idea of the ghetto has progressed in the past 75 years. When Drake and Cayton were writing, Duneier said, the ghetto was still a flourishing place. “[Black] people wanted to live among blacks,” he said, “but they also wanted to expand outward. Today the ghetto is less about racial purity than about other things. Today, it’s more about control.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.