Geographies: Writing the Shtetl into the Ghetto

Abstract

I am interested, first of all, in the logic of the transition from “tenement” to “ghetto” in the work of the sociologists from the Chicago School, arguably the earliest theorists of the city in the U.S., and, secondly, in how and why the Jewish ghetto became the archetypal ghetto in their work. In the sociological imagination, Jewish immigrants were seen as a group that wanted to Americanize but that also wished to remain apart; the ghetto emblematized, as it gave spatial expression to, that position and thereby exemplified Americanization as the sociologists defined and facilitated it. This essay explores both how the Jewish ghetto evolved as the expression of the sociologists’ understanding of Americanization and how the metaphor of contagion became central to that process. It is part of a larger project on contagion and Americanism in the twentieth century.