IN THE EARLY 2000s, the affluent New Jersey town of Tenafly, a suburb of New York, became embroiled in a bitter three-year legal battle over the proposed construction of an eruv to accommodate Orthodox Jewish families. The controversy was haunted by the specter of the ghetto. “The word ‘ghetto’ came up so frequently in the discussions about the eruv,” one scholar writes, “that it would be impossible to avoid the conclusion that this was a central issue.”1 In many ways, the controversy pitted Jew against Jew. The secular Jewish residents of Tenafly expressed the “there goes the neighborhood” fear, projecting that the bedroom community would be overrun by Orthodox Jewish families and by synagogues, restaurants, groceries, and other establishments designed to cater to that particular group. A letter sent to the (Jewish) mayor by a Mrs. Bernard Golden Sr. stated,
[The eruv] will … be the beginning of many more demands the orthodox people will impose on the town of Tenafly and its non-orthodox residents. Once this wire is put up on public property, that will be the signal for many more orthodox people to move into Tenafly and the value of property in Tenafly will go down and welfare will go up. This will be the making of a ghetto, and, Mayor, I don’t think you want this to happen on your watch.2
Others expressed concerns about the creation of a “community within a community” just like the enclaves “the Jews of Europe were forced to live in.” What is clear is that, when threatened with the prospect of their neighborhood becoming more Orthodox, liberal and secular Jews in Tenafly demonstrated the degree to which anxiety about the creation of a Jewish “ghetto” in suburbia—and a perceived step back in time in American Jewish life—remained potent. The word remains a keyword for American Jews, one that carries a special ideological charge and is capable of evoking images and associations that exceed any dictionary definition of the term.
Yet, at least outside Israel, such Jewish resonances of the word ghetto have mostly become the property of Jews themselves. The “ghetto” today is almost universally identified first and foremost with the experience of black Americans. Since the 1970s, there have been two primary developments with respect to the biography of the word and the genealogy of the concept. First, as William Julius Wilson among others has shown, the overlapping of race and class in the profile of the American ghetto has become more thoroughgoing.3 If earlier measures such as restrictive covenants and the simple refusal to sell or rent to blacks kept them hemmed into racial ghettos independent of their economic means, the passage of legislation aimed at outlawing housing discrimination (starting with the Fair Housing Act of 1968) gradually made it possible for middle- and upper-class blacks to move out of the ghetto. This created an outflow of the class that had basically sustained the institutional fabric of the ghetto. Simultaneously, the hollowing out of the urban manufacturing sector as a result of the larger trend of deindustrialization exacerbated the already existing problem of high unemployment and yielded the phenomenon of the “jobless” ghetto. This in turn led to the further social deterioration of ghetto neighborhoods and the escalation of violent crime and drug- and gang-related deaths. It also yielded an increasing depopulation of the American ghetto, creating the street scenes of boarded-up buildings and vacant lots that came to characterize the landscape of what photographer Camilo José Vergara has called the “New American Ghetto.”4 Side by side with these material changes, the “ghetto” came to loom large in the emergent hip-hop culture that evolved from an alternative art form in the late 1970s to the mainstream music industry and global idiom that it is today.5 The images of the “ghetto” (or “hood”) generated by rappers vary considerably. They can be unsparing in their depiction of the dangers and dilapidation of the streets.6 They can also occasionally be surprisingly nostalgic for the urban terrains that formed the artist.7 Above all, the “ghetto” is linked to a rhetoric of the “real” in hip-hop: however much the ghetto may be a place the rapper wants or wanted to get out of, the fact that he or she is a product of it and can recall it in such precise detail can serve as a symbol not only of authenticity but also of pride. Meanwhile, the past two decades have seen a virtual explosion in hip-hop variants of the term that has reverberated in American culture more generally. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang of 1994—which was never completed, let alone revised—contains three entries with the word “ghetto,” though two of the three receive only a cross-reference to the one term that had broken into the larger vocabulary by that time, namely “ghetto-blaster,” the large, portable radio-cassette players that had become a fad starting in the late seventies.8 By contrast, the now online Green’s Dictionary of Slang contains ten entries, from the word “ghetto” alone to “ghettofabulous.” Both of these slang terms offer evidence of how “ghetto” today can serve not only as a racialized slur, a means of stigmatizing someone or something, but also as an at least partially reclaimed slur, somewhat like the term “queer.” The Green Dictionary’s definition of “ghetto” is a picture of contrasts: the first meaning is “second-rate, old-fashioned, inferior, badly made,” while the second is “superior, first-rate.” The adjective “ghettofabulous” (or “ghetto fabulous”) was coined in the late nineties as a term for “anything flashy and impressive in black culture,” especially in fashion.9 All the slang expressions, however, have an African American template, even if some—like the ubiquitous and, to many, offensive and derogatory “that’s so ghetto” to describe something cheap and tawdry—have come to be widely used by millennials of all races. The proliferation of ghetto slang, coupled with the internationalization of hip-hop, contributes to an erasure of the ghetto concept’s Jewish origins. If the black appropriation of the term ghetto was once a source of tension and controversy, it now elicits little if any blowback.
There is one country where the Jewish associations of ghetto remain salient. In Israel today, the ghetto metaphor figures prominently in the ever starker conflict between left and right. The shared premise is that Israel was meant from the outset to be an antithesis to the ghetto; what divides the two sides is the belief that the other threatens to turn the state into a modern ghetto. On the liberal Zionist left, the argument runs that Israel, by creating and expanding settlements on the West Bank and pursuing an inward-looking politics oblivious to international opinion, is reviving the ghetto. As Amos Oz told columnist Roger Cohen in 2014, “There is a growing sense that Israel is becoming an isolated ghetto, which is exactly what the founding fathers and mothers hoped to leave behind them forever when they created the state of Israel.”10 In an editorial in Israel’s flagship liberal newspaper Ha’aretz in September 2017, Carolina Landsmann castigates the right-wing Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu government’s obsession with advancing a vision of a more homogeneously Jewish Israel by closing ranks against all African refugees. “Zionism,” she writes, “sought to effect a political and societal revolution, not to create a ghetto with nuclear bombs.”11 For the left, the transformation of Israel into a metaphorical ghetto is based on its presumed embrace of the status of a “nation that dwells alone” in its rhetoric and politics. On the right, the fear of Israel’s evolution into a ghetto has long been connected to the size of the territory it controls. With the increasing resort to Holocaust imagery starting under the first Likud prime minister, Menachem Begin, in the late 1970s to describe the threats Israel confronts, the ground was laid for comparison of proposed territorial concessions with the return of Israel to the ghetto. In 2013, the right-wing news outlet Arutz Sheva ran an opinion piece titled “Israel’s Ghetto Mentality.” The author discerned the signs of this state of mind not in isolationist or xenophobic politics, but in the alleged readiness of Israel’s government, during the last major round of negotiations with the Palestinians, to withdraw from most of the West Bank. “It is … ghetto-like thinking,” the author wrote, “that leads Israel’s government ministers to seriously advocate uprooting Jewish homes and villages in the Jews’ ancestral homeland; that they speak of exiling thousands of Jews in order to curry favor with Arab potentates’ and US coteries; that they make pacts with unrepentant terrorists whose anti-Semitism matches anything in the pages of Der Stürmer.” He predicted that the upshot of any two-state solution “will be a squeezed, narrow and urban Jewish ghetto with Muslim neighbors pressing from the eastern highlands, those which have been abandoned by the Jewish army.”12 The present-day incarnation of the “ghetto Jew,” according to the right, is the “Jew who is endlessly obsessed with how the rest of the world sees Israel” and “has reduced the reborn Jewish state to another ghetto, forever in peril and unable to escape from it, dependent on the goodwill of its masters outside the ghetto.”13 Thus, the argument essentially hinges on dichotomous assessments of the value of concern for Israel’s public image; the left judges the lack of it and the right the presence of it as evidence of ghetto thinking.
What further complicates the complexion of the ghetto metaphor in Israel is its appropriation by the Palestinians and their advocates, as well by Arab citizens of Israel, to designate their own experience of segregation at the hands of Israelis. The appropriation carries with it an accusation that the former ghettoized people par excellence have become the ghettoizers. Gaza, whose areas have some of the highest population densities in the world and which the Palestinian population is not free to leave or enter as a result of Israeli and Egyptian border closures and the Israeli sea and air blockade, has long been pictured in the Palestinian imagination as a “ghetto.”14 The ethics of analogy has figured prominently there, as well as in the battle over prototypes for Gaza. In particular during the fighting between Hamas-led Gaza and the Israelis in 2009 and 2014, some Palestinians and their supporters sought to compare Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto, an equivalence that papers over the gaping differences between the two and is designed more to provoke than to enlighten.15 Still, the allegation of ghettoization extends from the Palestinians of the territories to the Palestinians of Israel. In a 2017 op-ed about Israeli plans to build the first non-Jewish town in the history of the state, one that will be “one-and-a-half times more densely populated than badly crowded Tel Aviv,” the author, Israeli Arab Odeh Bisharat, drew attention to the “terrible irony” of the government’s preference for containing the Arab population in its own villages, towns, and cities: “Europe enclosed the Jews in ghettos and today, the Jews enclose the Arabs in ghettos.”16
In 2017, the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury published his latest novel, Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam, offering a new perspective on the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948. The “ghetto” in his title refers to the mandatory enclosures surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Israeli soldiers in which Palestinians who remained in places like Lod (the focus of the novel), Ramle, and Jaffa conquered by Israel in the 1948 War were confined during and in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. This is where and when the word ghetto entered the Palestinian lexicon, and it remains to this date an unofficial name for the Arab neighborhoods of these mixed cities. Yet what is particularly striking about the book’s title is its perhaps unwitting plagiarism of Israel Zangwill’s 1892 classic of the same name. The mantle of “children of the ghetto” in the novel is worn both by the survivors of the Holocaust and by the Palestinians restricted to the enclosures under their watch. The victims have become victimizers; the Palestinians, in the novel’s logic, are the “Jews of the Jews.” Khoury dramatizes this shared history of the word ghetto in the person of the protagonist, Adam Dannoun, an Arab citizen of Israel in his fifties living and working as a cook in a falafel restaurant in New York as he writes about his childhood memories in order to forget them. His parentage is unclear, and his identity as an Arab Israeli has proved, throughout his life, to be fluid and uncertain. What he knows is that he is a child of the ghetto—the ghetto created by the Israelis in Lod in July 1948 after their conquest of the city and expulsion of most of the Arab residents. He was a newborn in the newly established ghetto, and much of the book is devoted to recounting the story of the horrific suffering inflicted on the ghetto’s inhabitants after the conquest, which he has pieced together from the memories and testimonies of others. Yet Adam recalls that when he began studying Hebrew literature at the University of Haifa and, when asked where he was from, responded simply, “the ghetto,” “his comrades regarded him with compassion and took him for the son of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.”17 Indeed, at an early age after he had left “home,” he invented a parallel “Jewish” narrative for himself in which he was the son of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto killed in the 1948 War. The doubling of Warsaw and Lod functions as a recurring motif in the novel. There is thus a triangular structure to the ghetto metaphor in contemporary Israel / Palestine, where the term serves not only as fodder in the ongoing conflict between the Israeli left and right but also as a rhetorical arrow in the Palestinian quiver against Israel.
In 2016, Venice commemorated the five-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the ghetto in a year-long sequence of events and festivities. By all accounts, this was a first; there is no evidence of similar efforts to mark earlier major anniversaries of the founding of the Venetian Ghetto. Perhaps a certain measure of distance from the phenomenon was necessary to recommend the idea of a grand gesture of collective remembrance. The planning of the year’s series of events was a joint effort of the Jewish community of Venice and the municipality that had confined the former to the Ghetto Nuovo five centuries earlier. The opening ceremony was held on the date of the anniversary—March 29, 2016—at La Fenice Opera House with a keynote lecture by historian Simon Schama, followed by the playing of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in C Major by the Fenice symphony orchestra. From June to November, a lavish exhibition titled “Venice, the Jews, and Europe” was held in the majestic setting of the Ducal Palace, whence the 1516 decree restricting Venice’s Jews to the area of the ghetto had originated. For six days at the end of July, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was performed on the main square of the Ghetto Nuovo, setting the play in what would have been Shylock’s home, though the ghetto is not so much as mentioned in Shakespeare’s text. Several other events were held with reference to the play, including a mock appeal by Shylock presided over by none other than RBG herself, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In a letter appended to the beginning of the exhibition’s catalog, the president of the Jewish community, Paolo Gnignati, underscored that “the spirit that inspires us to commemorate this milestone in the history of the Jewish presence in Venice is devoid of even the slightest hint of any celebrative intentions.” But this sobriety proved difficult to sustain. The year’s events were, in the end, something of a celebration, not only of the Venice Ghetto’s tenacity and flourishing over its 281 years of existence but also, as the president of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia put it, of the “cultural diversity existing in the cosmopolitan Venice of the early sixteenth century.”18
The word ghetto has traveled a long distance to this moment of remembrance and reflection. It would be fair to say that it only truly emerged as a pan-European signifier at the very instant that it came to serve in nineteenth-century ghetto literature as a lieux de mémoire, a site of memory. As a literary and imagined space the “ghetto” has been laced with recollections of times past from its inception. Yet the word has undergone numerous resurrections, each time seemingly in defiance of the assumed course of modernity out of the ghetto. The demise of the Venetian Ghetto, like that of all the other early modern ghettos, was only the beginning of a semantic odyssey that continues into the present. Today, when the term ghetto has been universalized and its formerly dominant Jewish associations muted, there is value in retracing the sinuous road the word has voyaged to get to this point. Only by understanding the winding journey of the word ghetto within the Jewish experience can we begin to understand the complications that have attended its journey beyond it.