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.
