Episode 7: The Houses We Live In

Mark Oppenheimer 

Support for Antisemitism, U.S.A. comes from the Henry Luce Foundation and the David Bruce Smith Foundation.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The legendary crooner Frank Sinatra was famous for many things, his looks, his acting ability, his voice of course, and for being a friend of the Jews. He was committed to combatting anti Jewish hatred. He had objected to the exclusion of Jews from hotels and clubs in the United States. And during World War Two, he helped raise awareness about the Holocaust. After the war, he became a staunch supporter of the State of Israel. And in 1945, as World War Two was coming to an end, a young Frank Sinatra starred in a short film called The House I Live In.

Frank Sinatra 

If you are but a dream, I hope I never waken

Mark Oppenheimer 

In this 10 minute film, Sinatra records a song

Frank Sinatra 

It's more than I can bear

Mark Oppenheimer 

then steps outside for a smoke. He sees a group of kids chasing a boy and he intervenes.

Kids 

(all shouting)

Frank Sinatra 

Somebody in for a lickin'?

Boy #1 

You bet, we're gonna smear him

Frank Sinatra 

Yeah, but 10 against one that's not very fair.

Boy #1 

Ah come on

Kids 

(all shouting Come on)

Frank Sinatra 

What's it all about?

Boy #1 

None of your business.

Frank Sinatra 

Scared to tell me?

Boy #1 

No, I'm not scared. I'll fight you even.

Frank Sinatra 

(chuckles) Not if I can help it. I just want to know why the gang war

Boy #2 

We don't like him. We don't want him in our neighborhood or going to our school.

Jewish Boy 

I been livin' here as long as you!

Frank Sinatra 

What's he got smallpox or something?

Boy #3 

We don't like his religion!

Frank Sinatra 

His religion?

Boy #4 

Look Mr. He's a dirt-

Frank Sinatra 

Now hold on. I see what you mean. You must be a bunch of those Nazi werewolves I've been reading about.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It's never stated. But it's obvious that the boy being picked on is Jewish. Sinatra then gives the gang a lecture about religious tolerance. He tells them stories about the war, about how a Presbyterian and a Jew worked together to sink a Japanese battleship, about how blood from all sorts of different donors saved the lives of American soldiers.

Frank Sinatra 

Son anybody in your family ever go to the blood bank?

Boy #1 

Sure. My mother, my father both.

Frank Sinatra 

Uh huh. You know what? I bet ya maybe his pop's blood helped save your dad's life. That's bad.

Boy #5 

What's bad about it?

Frank Sinatra 

Well, don't you see? Your father doesn't go to the same church as his father does? That's awful. Do you think maybe if your father knew about it in time, he would rather have died than to take blood from the man of another religion? Would you have wanted him to die? Would your mom want him to die?

Boy #1 

No.

Frank Sinatra 

Look, fellas, religion makes no difference. Except maybe to a Nazi or somebody is stupid.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Because he's Sinatra. He then serenades the boys.

Frank Sinatra 

The house I live in.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And because it's Hollywood. They listen politely

Frank Sinatra 

A plot of earth, a street. The grocer and the butcher. And the people that I meet. The children in the playground. The faces that I see. All races and religions. That's America to me. The place I work in (fades but continues singing)

Frank Sinatra 

(behind narration) A worker at my side. A little town or city.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In the house I Live In, Sinatra promoted goodwill among Protestants, Catholics and Jews. It was one of many signs of a new American era

Frank Sinatra 

Where my people lived and died.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Antisemitism had ceased being respectable.

Frank Sinatra 

The howdy and the handshake. (continues behind narration) The air of feeling free.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Of course, nothing about this change was as simple as a 10 minute short film.

Frank Sinatra 

And the right to speak my mind out.

Mark Oppenheimer 

For starters, bigotry against Jews wasn't just a matter of people going to a different church. If antisemitism was no longer respectable, it was still there, even if it was underground and out of sight.

Frank Sinatra 

That's America to me

Mark Oppenheimer 

Bigotry waned and waxed in many different contexts. Sinatra's film showcases kids from different European backgrounds. But in many neighborhoods, the racial composition was far more complex. The song The House I Live In was written by Abel Meerepol. He was an activist on the far left of the political spectrum. Meerepol was particularly engaged in efforts to combat racism. He also wrote Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday's song about lynching. When Sinatra sang The House I Live In in the film, he left out a verse about neighbors white and black. According to some reports, Meerepol was upset about the exclusion. It's not clear why Sinatra didn't sing that particular verse. He shared Meerepol's views on race and racism, and most likely left out that and other verses just to keep the film short. But it's a reminder about how it's not always easy to talk about the intersection of antisemitism and anti black racism. In the decades after the Second World War, Jews and other American minorities often made common cause fighting against bigotry and discrimination. There were unprecedented successes in these efforts, but also new challenges.

Mark Oppenheimer 

I'm Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Antisemitism, U.S.A., a podcast on the history of antisemitism in the United States. Episode Seven, The Houses We Live In. On September 8 1945, three days before the premiere of The House I Live In, a Jewish woman became Miss America for the first time. Bess Myerson was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents who raised her in the Shalom Aleichem Cooperative Housing Complex in the northern Bronx. It was a tight knit working class, mostly Yiddish speaking neighborhood. In ways that would have alarmed many Americans, the politics of the neighborhood ranged from socialist to communist. Myerson's childhood wasn't always happy. Her classmates teased her about her height, she was 5' 10" by her 12th birthday, but Myerson became a talented pianist. She studied music at Hunter College, the city's public college for women. She worked part time, including a modeling job that she kept secret from her parents. About the time of her graduation from Hunter, one of Myerson's sisters sent her photograph to the organizers of the Miss New York City contest, whose winner would proceed to the Miss America Pageant. The prize was $5,000, which Meyerson hoped to use for graduate school, and she knew that if she won, all sorts of other doors would open to her.

Mark Oppenheimer 

At the Miss New York City contest, Leonora Slaughter, the executive director of Miss America, pulled Myerson aside for a chat. Slaughter was pleased when Myerson told her she intended to attend graduate school, rather than pursue a career in modeling or acting, and she thought Myerson had a real chance to advance to the national pageant. But Slaughter had some advice. Bess Myerson should change her name to something that sounded less Jewish, like Betty Merrick or Betty Meredith. It wasn't a crazy suggestion. Kirsten Fermaglich, the author of A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, has looked at thousands of petitions New Yorkers filed in civil court to change their names.

Kirsten Fermaglich 

For Jews, they are showing up in numbers that are far disproportionate to their residence in New York City and far disproportionate to their proportion of the population. It's not only Jews doing it, but it really becomes kind of a part of Jewish culture at this moment. You can see if you look at newspaper stories, magazines, films at this time, especially during the war, and immediately afterwards, it is becoming sort of identified with Jews. Name changing is really identified with Jews and with Jewish culture and with antisemitism.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Most of the Jewish New Yorkers who change their names were from the next generation, men and women who recognized that their outward Jewishness was an impediment.

Kirsten Fermaglich 

It is really about Jews' upward mobility that is in part kind of motivating their search for new names. But that also sort of lets us know that Jews, especially because Jews are disproportionately doing this, that they are also the most concerned about their names and the ones who have the most to fear what it would mean to put their names on an application form. They are the ones whose names are most associated with the racial category of being Jewish. And they are experiencing growing and then very high levels of institutionalized antisemitism at this moment. So they're the ones who are the most worried that if they put their names down, they will not get a job at the end of it.

Mark Oppenheimer 

About a third of these Jewish petitioners were women who were seeking jobs in offices and schools. Fermaglich found that New York help wanted ads and employment agencies made it clear that Jewish applicants weren't welcome.

Kirsten Fermaglich 

90, 95% of employers in New York City are telling employment agencies don't send us Jewish girls. And so Jews as they are seeking middle class jobs, they are also being faced with institutionalized antisemitism in these middle class spaces, in education and employment, that is actively seeking to limit their entry and their their upward mobility. I see name changing as kind of at the sort of at this perfect storm of these two phenomena, which I think are very closely intertwined.

Mark Oppenheimer 

American Jews had many responses to job discrimination. Even before World War Two, they could sometimes use moral suasion or shame to get employers to change their ways. Depending on laws in their state, they might sue. The most common strategy was simply to move on and find a less bigoted employer, perhaps a Jewish employer. But Jewish men and women often tried to mask their Jewishness, at least when they filled out application forms or interviewed for jobs. Some Jewish women would wear a cross necklace or lie about where they lived or where their parents were born. And in the face of discrimination, some men and women did change their names.

Kirsten Fermaglich 

A woman named Dora Sarietzky tries to change her name in the 1930s. She describes in her petition, kind of the multiple places that she has gone to try to get a job and that she was not able to get a job and so maybe five or six years beforehand, she had changed her name.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And after she changed her last name to Watson, she immediately landed a job. Just to be clear, antisemitism didn't disappear in the US after World War Two, in fact, named changing petitions peaked in New York City in 1946. So it wasn't crazy that in 1945 Bess Myerson, was encouraged to change her name. But Myerson refused, she knew that her parents would have been mortified if she had done so. Years later, she said "it was the most important decision I ever made. It told me who I was that I was first and foremost a Jew." Myerson won the New York City pageant, and was one of 40 contestants in the national pageant held in Atlantic City that September. Historian Pamela Nadell, the author of America's Jewish Women, explains the cultural significance of the Miss America Pageant.

Pamela Nadell 

There wasn't something else like this. I mean, we don't even have television broadcasting it at this point. This was America focused on the best and the brightest of American womanhood, and she would be crowned Miss America and she would then tour wearing her crown. She would go on a tour across America and be honored in this way.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In Atlantic City, there were whispers about whether or not a Jewish woman could win. Judges reported getting phone calls, warning them not to let Myerson win. There were anonymous death threats, sponsors warned that they would pull their funds if a Jewish woman won. But Myerson and the judges were undeterred. And on September 8, Myerson became Miss America, draped in an ermine robe, wearing a glittering crown and holding a scepter and a bouquet of roses. For American Jews, this was a stunning development.

Pamela Nadell 

When she was crowned, the Jews who were in the hall were yelling, mazel tov. You could hear it ringing out in the hall. But on her tour, what should have been her tour, under the pageant sponsors, three out of the five pageant sponsors refused to send a Jewish Miss America out on tour and to use her in their ads.

Mark Oppenheimer 

One of those sponsors was the Ford Motor Company. They'd promised a new car to the winner, but Myerson never got her car. Growing up in a predominantly Jewish part of New York, Myerson hadn't realized the extent of antisemitism in the country. But she soon discovered that even though she had won the pageant, some doors were still closed to her. In 1974, nearly three decades after her pageant success, Myerson talked with famed interviewer Studs Terkel and Terkel asked her about her life after winning and when she became interested in politics.

Bess Myerson 

I don't think the exterior and the invitation to do that was as influencing as my own inner self of how I lived and where I lived and my feeling of discrimination that I had experienced and kind of borderline poverty and

Studs Terkel 

discrimination as a woman you mean?

Bess Myerson 

No, interestingly, discrimination as the first Jewish Miss America.

Studs Terkel 

Oh, I wasn't aware that. Oh, that's what was the discrimination? What was the nature of the discrimination?

Bess Myerson 

Well, let me just say a couple of things before I said that what I'm trying to say is that is that having lived through certain experiences, I could identify very strongly with what it was to be abused or feel abused or feel disadvantaged or taken advantage of. I think that was a lot, a part of my desire to take this job. Umm, the discrimination was obvious. You know, we were living at a time when there was a great deal of bigotry around the country. And I suddenly discovered as Miss America, if I were going to use that portion of it as a commercial venture and make the money that the other girls were making, there were certain places I wasn't invited to, certain things that I couldn't do because the people had never invited anyone into their home before who was Jewish. If anything, I would get to a city and there'd be a reception for me at a country club. And the hostess would say to the person who was accompanying me, I'm terribly sorry, but we just didn't realize that Miss Myerson was Jewish, you know we, why didn't you tell us, or how can we have a reception for someone in a in a club that excludes members of her faith. I remember packing my bag and walking out of a community going home and telling the pageant that I wouldn't have anything to do with them anymore, and that's what I did.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The year after Myerson won, the Anti Defamation League asked her if she would go on a speaking tour. She started visiting schools and community halls, speaking on the topic, you can't be beautiful and hate. Myerson went on to a long and varied career in television and later in politics. Bess Myerson's experience says a lot about the still uncertain place of Jews in America immediately after World War Two. On the one hand, a Jew could win the Miss America Pageant. But on the other hand, many hotels and clubs were still off limits.

Mark Oppenheimer 

As of 1945, it was still legal in most of the country, for employers or universities to discriminate against Jews, African Americans, or other minorities. During the war, the Fair Employment Practices Commission had implemented a ban on job discrimination in defense industries and government agencies. The primary intended beneficiaries were African Americans, but Jews benefited as well. The ban wasn't enforced perfectly, but it served as a check against blatantly discriminatory job ads. But then the commission vanished after the war. And while some states passed laws against employment discrimination, others didn't. Here's Britt Tevis, author of Jews Not Admitted: Antisemitism, Civil Rights and Public Accommodation Laws.

Britt Tevis 

What I think actually happens after World War Two is there is a degree of shame, people become much less public about their intention to discriminate. So the Henry Hilton's of the world who come out and very open about anti Jewish discrimination that becomes disreputable. That's no longer acceptable, because the awareness of the attempted genocide that happens in Europe, and because of the war effort, and because of the effort of the federal government to get the entire country behind the war effort. That being said, the actual discrimination continues.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And frankly, there is a lot of duplicity. Companies claimed they don't know which of their employees are Jewish. Managers say it's hard to tell just by name or appearance. Some companies stopped placing Gentile only ads but quietly code applicants as Jewish. It may be that as better educated Jews entered the white collar workforce, antisemitic employers more actively discriminated against them. In fact, some prominent universities started imposing anti Jewish measures after the war. Johns Hopkins introduced limits on Jewish enrollment in 1945. Stanford started discriminating against prospective Jewish students in the 1950s.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In response to this ongoing and still pervasive discrimination, Jewish activists investigated and pressured companies and universities. They wrote exposes and attempted to shame and persuade. In states that did have fair hiring statutes, activists brought lawsuits. Anti Jewish discrimination didn't vanish because Americans felt bad for Jews after the Holocaust, or because they were celebrating a new era of religious toleration. It slowly diminished because Jews and others fought against discrimination state by state, school by school, company by company, hotel by hotel. Jonathan Greenblatt is head of the Anti Defamation League, and he explains how his organization combated antisemitism in the years after the war

Jonathan Greenblatt 

that kind of advocacy really became part of what ADL championed, filing amicus briefs, and also exposing bad practices. So ADL leaders would do things like call a restaurant, call a hotel, and say Hi, this is Mr. Goldberg and I'd like to make a reservation. The hotel or the restaurant would say No, we don't have any availability, then they would call five minutes later and say Hi I'm Mr. Smith or Mr. O'Brien, Oh yes, we have a table or a room for you. ADL would do those kinds of things then tell the business they're going to expose them discriminating, and then cause that embarrassment and get the business to change its policies.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In 1964, those decades of advocacy by the ADL and other organizations paid off. Congress passed a landmark Civil Rights Act, often remembered for the impact it had on the lives of African Americans. It also created the legal basis for dismantling anti Jewish discrimination. The law banned employment discrimination on the basis of race or religion, the two most common ways that Americans classify Jews. The law also banned discrimination by educational institutions. And it made it illegal for hotels, resorts, and other places open to the public to exclude or discriminate against Jews. That doesn't mean that antisemitic discrimination entirely ceased. Just as these laws didn't eliminate anti black racism. But certain forms of anti Jewish discrimination that had been pervasive earlier in the century were now against the law. We'll have more after the break.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Four years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Fred Nauman lost his teaching job. He was 38, his parents were German Jews who had been fortunate enough to get the family to the US right before the Second World War. Nauman taught at junior high 271 in Ocean Hill, Brownsville, part of Brooklyn, New York. He was a union man, Chapter chairman for the United Federation of Teachers or UFT, which represented 55,000 public school teachers in New York City. On May 9 1968, Nauman was just a few minutes into teaching his first class of the morning, when he was asked to report to the principal's office. He was handed an envelope. The letter inside told him he'd lost his position, effective immediately, and that he should report the next morning to the central office for reassignment. Nauman didn't report for reassignment. Instead, he called his union headquarters in Manhattan. And his reassignment set off a firestorm that lasted almost a year, engulfed the city, and made national news. What was at the heart of this conflict? Was it about racism? Was it a conflict about antisemitism? Was it all about class? It's complicated.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The Ocean Hill and Brownsville neighborhoods had undergone a dramatic transformation between the 1940s and the 1960s. Here's historian Jerald Podair, author of The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill, Brownsville Crisis.

Jerry Podair 

If you visited Ocean Hill, Brownsville in the 1940s, you would find basically a working class or lower middle class, Jewish neighborhood, an almost completely white neighborhood, a neighborhood of people who worked with their hands and whose children worked with their hands. Now, their children aspired to work with their minds and brains in the 1940s. But their fathers and mothers were working class manual workers. It was, as I said, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Some Italian Americans also lived there. Very few people of color in the 1940s.

Mark Oppenheimer 

A lot of Jewish immigrants came to this part of Brooklyn. So while antisemitism was pervasive in the country in the 30s, and 40s, in Ocean Hill in Brownsville, Jews could find community and they could find jobs, and they could live out the American dream.

Jerry Podair 

And I think what was distinctive about Ocean Hill, Brownsville in the 1940s, is the fact that you could come to the United States, let's say if you were a Jewish immigrant or an Italian immigrant, without any educational skills, maybe not even being able to read and write English, and still get a job in a factory in the garment center, maybe open a small business, a small store, and you were able to do that in the 1940s and 1960s. Because the New York economy was an industrial based economy and there were jobs available. They may not have been the best jobs in the world, but they afforded a living, and it allowed you to live as an immigrant an American life or At least the beginnings of it.

Mark Oppenheimer 

For many decades, the big divide in Brooklyn had been between white Catholics and Jews. That's what's shown in Frank Sinatra's The House I Live In. But in the decades after the war, new faultlines emerged as Ocean Hill Brownsville underwent a rapid transformation. Charles Isaacs, the author of Inside Ocean Hill - Brownsville, explains what happened.

Charles Isaacs 

But during the 40s and 50s, it changed very rapidly. Brownsville was Jewish, Ocean Hill was Italian. The Gambino mafia family was based there. By the mid 60s, Ocean Hill was all black. Brownsville was black and Puerto Rican. There were a few Italian families left but very few.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It's a familiar American story, black migration and white flight. But here's the twist. By the 1960s, the students in Ocean Hill and Brownsville public schools were black or Puerto Rican. But the teachers, including Fred Nauman, were still almost entirely white and Jewish. A few months after Naumann lost his position, Charles Isaacs got a job at junior high 271. Here's Isaacs talking about the schools in the neighborhood.

Charles Isaacs 

For me, the the most important aspect of that, aside from them being under supplied and physically falling apart. They were the dumping ground for teachers from the white schools who were underperforming. But it was it was almost impossible to fire a teacher under the union rules. So what they did was transfer them from the white schools where they weren't any good, and just dump them into the ghetto schools. So these schools had the worst teachers. And this is anecdotal, not statistical, but they were known for their racism. One of my students told me that at the previous year, the union chapter chairman in her school, routinely referred to them as monkeys.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The Ocean Hill Brownsville schools were segregated, not by law, but on the basis of who lived in the neighborhood. Civil Rights leaders in Brooklyn demanded school integration. But the only kind of integration they got was black and Puerto Rican. So by the mid 60s, black leaders in Ocean Hill and Brownsville began pushing for community control of their schools. They wanted control over what was taught and who taught it. It was part and parcel of the later more radical civil rights movement in which activists demanded not just integration, but Black Power. Here's historian Glen Harris, the author of The Ocean Hill Brownsville Conflict,

Glen Harris 

Community control really comes out of that radical change in the civil rights movement and the growth of the Black Power movement, who's going to have the power and the authority to address those concerns about the school systems in Ocean Hill Brownsville? Who's going to control that? And this is before it becomes a black and Jewish conversation. There's a huge disconnect between what the parents see and what their children are dealing with, and who's in charge of those school systems.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The New York City Board of Education made some concessions toward community control. In 1967, it created local school boards for several neighborhoods, including Ocean Hill Brownsville. Soon the neighborhood had its own elected school board and a unit administrator named Rhody McCoy. McCoy had been teaching in the New York City schools for nearly 30 years. He was a soft spoken man, but not one to back down once he had committed himself to a cause. The local board composed of neighborhood parents claimed for itself authority over hiring, curriculum, and finances. Along with the city's school superintendent, McCoy hired a number of principals who had not taken the customary exams for their new positions. The United Federation of Teachers had not agreed to this arrangement nor had their president Albert Shanker. Here's Jerald Podair again,

Jerry Podair 

Albert Shanker wasn't born in Ocean Hill Brownsville, but he could have been in terms of his culture in terms of his values. He was born to a lower middle class or working class Jewish family in Queens in the 1920s, and grew up basically steeped in labor politics, and specifically socialism. He grew up as a young socialist, he was a member of the Young Socialist League, later on the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which is operated by the Socialist Party. So Shanker's politics are liberal to left wing. Looking back from our perspective, that, it would be more than liberal. I mean, he did consider himself a socialist. Not all that many liberals in New York and as he was growing up in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, are coming of age are even going to openly identify themselves as socialists, but Albert Shanker did. He follows the route of many other young Jews in that era. He becomes a New York City public school teacher, and I think it's quite natural for him in the 1950s. For him to get involved in labor politics, and trying to organize the New York City teachers into a union.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Shanker supported the civil rights movement. He was at the 1963 March on Washington. Two years later, he had marched in Selma, and he supported Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's March. But by 1968 Shanker's first commitment was to collective bargaining and due process for New York City's teachers. When Shanker had begun teaching, the teachers in the public schools didn't have a powerful union,

Jerry Podair 

In the 1950s in New York City, if you were a teacher, you were pretty much under the thumb of your principal. The principal could move you around, could make your life miserable, could make your life great. You didn't have a lot of autonomy or power as a teacher. And Shanker tried to set out to change that.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The United Federation of Teachers, or UFT, came about through a merger between a socialist union and a Marxist union.

Jerry Podair 

Shanker quickly became the leader of that union, and basically established it as a powerful player in the American labor movement in the 1960s. Conducting a successful strike for collective bargaining rights, becoming the sole collective bargaining agent for the New York City teachers in the early 1960s, negotiating a contract and by 1968, the United Federation of Teachers under Shanker's leadership was becoming and had become a powerful force in the New York City educational system.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Now Ocean Hill Brownsville administrator Rhody McCoy wasn't one to back down, but he met his match in Albert Shanker. When the United Federation of Teachers heard about the irregularly hired principals, it joined a lawsuit to challenge not only those hiring decisions, but also the appointment of McCoy. For Shanker, these due process issues were at the heart of justice. The lawsuits dragged on for more than a year. Other points of tension arose. By this point, McCoy and his allies knew which teachers supported community control and which did not. Some black teachers introduced lesson plans that featured African culture and African American revolutionaries from Nat Turner to Malcolm X. As the union, the Board of Education, and the community board continued to feud over matters of hiring, McCoy prepared to force the issue. In May 1968, the local board sent a letter of termination to Fred Nauman and 18 other teachers. All of them were white, and almost all of them were Jewish. Just to be clear, these teachers weren't fired. They were directed to the Central School Board Office for reassignment but at the same time, the Central School Board hadn't given the local board the authority to do that. These reassignments led to a year of recriminations, lawsuits, and strikes. The community activists were determined that Nauman and the other teachers would never teach a junior high 271 again. In response, Shanker fought back against what he saw as the arbitrary punishment of teachers that community members didn't like. By the fall of 1968 Shanker determined to bring maximum pressure on the school board and city government to resolve the conflict. The UFT voted to strike again and again, trying to force the mayor and the Board of Education to reinstate Nauman and the other teachers. Across the city tens of thousands of teachers stayed home. But not in Ocean Hill Brownsville, there most of the teachers reported for work and the schools stayed open. Charlie Isaacs had just started teaching math at junior high 271. During that time, our district was under siege. 10% of the New York City Police Department was stationed in the one square mile of Ocean Hill, Brownsville. And the kids had to walk through these this police gauntlet to get to school.

Jerry Podair 

That fall, Karriema Jordan entered school 71 as an eighth grader.

Karriema Jordan 

We had to go through barricades to get to the school and you'd look up and on the rooftops, across the street from the school, the cops were with the helmet gear, the riot helmets, and the nightsticks, and helicopters. And the playground was converted into a precinct. And walking up to the school you have just mass confusion. You have the community people out there, you have the UFT, you have the black teachers on the inside.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Meanwhile, the rest of the public schools in New York City were closed. A million children were missing out on weeks of education. Everyone was seething. And in their anger, people blamed either the Union or the community control activists, and who they blamed largely dependent on whether they were white or black. In the early 60s, Al Shanker and Rhody McCoy would have considered themselves allies, but not by 1968. The 68 strikes showed just how much things had changed. The strikes became about race and class. On one side were white Catholic policemen and Jewish teachers. And on the other side were black families, students, and activists. And when the two sides faced each other along picket lines or in protests outside of schools or outside City Hall, their interactions were not always polite. As you might imagine, there were vile anti black and antisemitic slurs. In the late fall of 1968, copies of an unsigned letter began to appear. They landed in school mailboxes, they were slipped under apartment doors, they were spread all over town. The letter stated that quote, "Middle East murderers of Colored People" could not teach black children the truth. It called Jews, "bloodsucking exploiters and murderers" as well as "money changers." Even liberal Jews who might seem friendly, were in reality "tricky" and "deceitful." To this day, the authorship of that letter remains unknown. Charles Isaacs remembers the arrival of this letter,

Charles Isaasc 

I think I found a leaflet under my apartment door, that was in two parts. It was a combination of two alleged leaflets that had been distributed. On the top of the page was a reproduction of a leaflet that basically just called for more black teachers in the schools. It was really antisemitic. But it turned out to be mastheaded by an organization that never existed. And then the bottom half was virulently antisemitic. But it had no signature. You couldn't tell where it came from. And the message was that this had been placed in all the teachers' mailboxes in the district. The Union reprinted half a million copies of this and spread it all over the city. So with the due process claim blown out, now, the issue had become black antisemitism, and that was what they ran on.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Regardless of who wrote the letter and who disseminated it, the antisemitic letter reshaped the dynamics of the conflict, making it a struggle not just about due process, but about hatred and bigotry. And there were other incidents. On a radio broadcast, an African American teacher named Les Campbell read aloud a poem that he dedicated to Albert Shanker. The poem went in part, "hey Jew boy with that yarmulke on your head, you pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead." Looking back on the conflict 30 years later, Rhody McCoy pinpointed that moment as the inflection point in the story.

Rhody McCoy 

The incident of Les Campbell reading a poem. You just made Les Campbell, the best paid friend of Al Shanker, you handed him what he needed.

Mark Oppenheimer 

As antisemitism began to play a larger role in the conflict, it got attention in the media,

Rhody McCoy 

Because on any number of speaking engagements that I was asked to appear before, Jewish people would ask me, Why are we trying to put them in the ovens? Because the overwhelming percentage of teachers of that 19 were obviously Jewish, because that's what you had in New York City. So they were saying, Why are you destroying and taking these postures against Jews?

Mark Oppenheimer 

In an interview, Shanker acknowledges that antisemitism only really emerged as an issue as the conflict escalated.

Al Shanker 

Antisemitism was not it certainly had nothing to do with starting the strike and it had nothing to do with keeping the strike going and it had nothing to do with the settlement. It had an awful lot to do with how people came to see the strike and public terms. During the course of the strike, several of the leaders of the Afro American Teachers' Association distributed, and as a matter of fact, some of the official literature of the Afro American Teachers' Association contained antisemitic pieces. And this then, the issue of antisemitism became a very important issue.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Black community leaders found the talk of antisemitism a distraction. McCoy said, "we have more important things to be concerned about than making anti semitism a priority." After all, as McCoy knew, there was no shortage of anti black racism among Brooklyn's Jewish population. For McCoy, the real problem remained an educational system that put the interests of white people, teachers, and administrators, over those of black children. Math teacher Charles Isaacs believes that accusations of antisemitism were largely manufactured by opponents of community control.

Charles Isaasc 

I was amazed because I had been in Ocean Hill Brownsville for six months or so. I had been in the anti poverty program before that. I never saw any I mean, this is really zero evidence of antisemitism. I made no secret that I was Jewish. In our school was leadership of the African American Teachers' Association, who was being accused, who were friends of mine. And yeah this was just all made up.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And historian Glen Harris agrees, in the sense that dueling narratives about racism and antisemitism obscured the central issue of community control.

Glen Harris 

My position is that all the other conversations and the necessary conversations became second hand to dealing with this issue about antisemitism and racism in the school system. And I fault Shaker (sic) for doing that because before this, I believe that the outcome of Ocean Hill Brownsville, and that what that started was a a necessary and important conversation about community control and what school curriculums will be. That's a conversation that would have broadened into all of the boroughs of New York City. Taking that away, and moving it into a conversation about antisemitism about racism and prejudice really took the foundation away from the importance of what was taking place at Ocean Hill Brownsville. Albert Shanker took that away from Ocean Hill Brownsville by injecting antisemitism, if you inject antisemitism, racism is coming into play.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And historian Jerald Podair agrees that the local board didn't reassign Fred Nauman and the other Jewish teachers because they were Jews. At the same time, he acknowledges the role of anti Jewish sentiment in the black community during the Ocean Hill Brownsville dispute and beyond,

Jerry Podair 

there is antisemitism, and it's certainly wrong to try to minimize it, it would be the same thing to try to minimize instances of racism. Sometimes you can't disentangle the antisemitism or the racism from the other issue here, which is the idea of community control, which almost transcends race, but I still think it's there. And marginalized groups obviously have much less in the way of agency for their actions. They are much more hemmed in, in terms of the choices that they are allowed to make. So they have much less agency, but they do have some agency. And I think that covers these instances of antisemitism. Just as you know, a marginalized, let's say, lower class or working class, white community has enough agency not to engage in racism or to be held responsible when they do engage in it.

Mark Oppenheimer 

How does any antisemitism that might have been present among the black residents of Ocean Hill Brownsville relate to the larger story of anti Jewish hate?

Jerry Podair 

I view the antisemitism that comes out of Ocean Hill Brownsville as a product of social conditions. In other words, if you're an African American living in Ocean Hill Brownsville in 1968, who are the white people that you see and interact with, with the exception of the police, who are Irish or Irish American, the only whites you see pretty much are Jews - Jewish landlords, Jewish storekeepers, and of course Jewish teachers. Those are the whites that you see. If you are going to to lash out at these whites, if you're going to attack these whites in a crisis situation like Ocean Hill, Brownsville, it is not surprising that you will shift from white to Jewish in terms of your attacks. So I view the anti semitism as not particularly black anti semitism, but the result of social conditions, and also what I call situational antisemitism, as opposed to what I call systemic antisemitism. Situational antisemitism comes out of specific situations, specific circumstances, like the Ocean Hill Brownsville school strike.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In November 1968, the strike finally ended. The Union got most of what it wanted. The reviled teachers got to go back to Ocean Hill Brownsville schools, but they left for other positions as soon as they possibly could. The strikes and the unsatisfying resolution left a bad taste in the mouths of nearly everyone, including Jewish teachers and black parents. In the end, the biggest losers in Ocean Hill Brownsville were the neighborhood's children and families. They didn't get meaningful community control. They didn't get integration. And they didn't get the education they deserved. Ocean Hill Brownsville illustrated that African Americans and American Jews were not on parallel trajectories after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. While it was the legal end of discrimination in voting rights, employment, education, housing, and public accommodations, the law did not produce rapid socio economic gains for black Americans. The color line was still there. And for black Americans, Jews were on the other side of it.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Here's Glen Harris.

Glen Harris 

Are Jews going to be Jewish? Or are they going to be white? Well black Americans look at them, originally, they make no distinction between those two. They're like, well, Jews are white. And because they're becoming a part of the American establishment, that is what the conflict becomes, because those obstacles are still there for black Americans. And they see Jews making these inroads. They don't see them as Jews originally, they just see them as other white Americans making these inroads.

Mark Oppenheimer 

There is solid data that suggests that African Americans today hold antisemitic views at somewhat higher rates than white Americans. The same holds for Latino Americans. And rates of antisemitic beliefs among those and other populations have grown sharply in recent years. Social scientists haven't reached a consensus on why this is the case. And that's just one of the vexatious things about antisemitism in the US, past and present. Anti Jewish prejudice and hatred isn't confined to one small pocket of the American population, nor is it confined to one party, religion, or race. Ocean Hill Brownsville is a reminder of how hatred and injustice are deeply entangled throughout American history, in ways that we still don't understand.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Thank you for listening to Antisemitism, U.S.A. it's a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Visit R2studios.org for a complete transcript of today's episode and for suggestions for further reading. I'm your host Mark Oppenheimer. Antisemitism, U.S.A. is written by John Turner and Lincoln Mullen. Britt Tevis is our lead scholar, Jim Ambuske is our producer, Jeanette Patrick is our executive producer. We'd like to thank Zev Eleff for being our lead advisor and we'd like to thank our advisory board members, Laura Shaw Frank, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan Sarna. Our graduate assistants are Rachel Birch, Alexandra Miller, and Amber Pelham. Many thanks to Kirsten Fermaglich, Pamela Nadell, Britt Tevis, Jonathan Greenblatt, Jerald Podair, Charles Isaacs and Glen Harris, for sharing their expertise with us in this episode, archival audio material courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington University Libraries, and the Studs Terkel Archive. We're able to bring you this show through the generosity of the Henry Luce Foundation, the David Bruce Smith Foundation, and many individual donors like you. Thank you for listening. And we hope you'll join us for the next episode.