“The law was much different in those days. We had covenants on the properties. They used to incense me. They are still of record, although they are no longer legal, those covenants that were on real estate property: a Jew, or anyone of the black race, Syrians, could not live in 90 percent of the neighborhoods in Washington.”
–Leo Bernstein, Jewish lawyer and real estate developer, 1981, recalling the 1930s in Washington, DCFootnote 2
For 66-year-old Leo Bernstein, interviewed in the early 1980s, racial restrictive covenants were a pivotal part of Jewish history in Washington, DC. Bernstein had followed his father into the real estate business in the 1930s to enormous success but with an abiding sense of exclusion. Penning his memoir twenty years after the oral history interview, Bernstein held firm to this memory: “The covenants placed by neighborhood associations were thorough, generally serving to deny anyone but white, Protestant families permission to move in.”Footnote 3 Bernstein was not alone. Among Washington Jews, restrictive covenants that discriminated against Jewish home seekers are a recurring theme in memoirs and oral histories, and they remain a part of the DC Jewish community’s shared narrative and identity. Indeed, they remain a part of a broader public understanding of DC’s history of housing discrimination.
Restrictions in property deeds, along with zoning laws and subdivision regulations, were crucial innovations for real estate developers in the early-twentieth-century United States. They allowed builders to execute their visions for high-value housing and to ensure consistency of the so-called “character” of neighborhoods, towns, and cities long after individual properties were sold and sold again. Smaller-scale builders also used them to signal “secure” property values. Property covenants were typically inserted into deeds by builders, but they could also be arranged by homeowners collectively through associations or petitions.Footnote 4 Racial restrictive covenants barred the use or occupancy of property by certain groups of people based on race, religion, or nationality. They could be found in the property deeds of homes across the United States between the 1920s and the 1950s, though the first one in Leo Bernstein’s part of the country appeared in 1904, barring Black buyers from a development in then-rural Montgomery County, Maryland.Footnote 5 These covenants were intended to maintain racial segregation, white supremacy, and the property values of the homes white people built and bought.
Before the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial restrictive covenants “unenforceable” in the landmark ruling Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), courts explicitly backed these “protective” intentions by defining the presence of certain residents—almost always Black people—as a “nuisance” or “injurious” to property owners. Restrictive covenants conveyed near permanent social and racial character to private property and, in the words of historian David Freund, defined “a community’s right to discriminate” to ensure that character. It was a DC case involving a Black homebuyer, Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), in which the Supreme Court first blessed these covenants as mere expressions of private property rights before reversing itself twenty-two years later.Footnote 6 That deed restrictions could also be used to prevent Jews from buying homes left a deep scar for many American Jews. That scar not only reflected the history of antisemitism but also what many Jews saw as a direct connection between Black and Jewish experiences in the U.S. housing market and as oppressed American minorities overall.
This article seeks to extricate the stories of Black and Jewish encounters with racial restrictive covenants, particularly in the history of Washington, DC. It is not a secret to scholars that anti-Black racism and antisemitism have worked differently in United States history.Footnote 7 Few scholars draw the simplistic connection Leo Bernstein did when he said that Jews were equally as barred from decent housing as African Americans in Washington or anywhere else. Instead, scholars have noted that Jews have faced prejudice, social exclusion, nativism, and discrimination in the United States, but they have also tracked Jewish access to American privileges, including most American Jews’ access to whiteness (however contingent) and full citizenship.Footnote 8 Thus, Ulysses S. Grant’s antisemitic General Order No. 11 expelling Jews from Union-occupied territory during the Civil War, the lynching of Leo Frank in 1913, the ravings of Henry Ford, immigration restrictions, and quotas at universities between the world wars reveal the very real presence of antisemitism in America but also the difficulties that most Jews overcame as they found a comfort and success in the United States unimaginable in the parts of Europe from which most American Jews came.Footnote 9 African Americans can tell a different story.
Scholarly knowledge has not always informed or shaped collective community narratives, though. Some Jewish American communities have held onto narratives that dissolve these differences, sometimes out of simple unawareness but sometimes for more strategic reasons. “Strategic” does not necessarily imply nefarious or ill intent. For example, goodwill claims of shared oppression have often supplied powerful bonds of solidarity between Jews and other minorities, and Jewish leaders and institutions have long argued that Jewish experience with oppression obligates Jews to work for justice for all people.Footnote 10 However well meaning, strategic narratives can dissolve important historical differences, leading to misunderstandings about experiences and inequities in American life. Even if scholars have sought to raise and examine these distinctions, the persistence of flattened history or misremembered pasts calls out for examination. In 1980s Washington, DC, a city struggling under the burdens of white flight and urban disinvestment, over-policing and a crack-driven crime wave, as well as deep conflict between the city’s Black and Jewish communities, the persistence of such flattened history drove the wedge between the two communities deeper and laid the basis for ongoing misunderstanding.Footnote 11
Leo Bernstein’s memory was inaccurate—Jewish Washingtonians were never blocked from 90 percent of DC-area housing. In the District of Columbia, a recent study of about 24,000 property deeds found that just 1.3 percent of known racial restrictive covenants excluded Jews.Footnote 12 But examining memories like Leo Bernstein’s is not simply a matter of casting doubt on personal or community-based narratives about the past. The idea that DC’s Jews faced the same—or even similar—barriers to fair housing opportunities as Black Washingtonians leads to two key, and related, misunderstandings about the DC area’s past and present: first, it clouds our understanding of how and why many Jewish Washingtonians managed to achieve social mobility despite antisemitism, and, second, of how and why many Black Washingtonians continued to face barriers long after Jews overcame them. This article seeks to be specific about the history of Washington’s Jews and racial restrictive covenants and to examine the relationship between that history and the memory embedded within community-based narratives.
In addition to pulling apart experiences and narratives involving Black and Jewish Washingtonians, this article also contributes to scholarly efforts to break up the New York-based “normative American Jewish experience,” in the words of Hasia Diner.Footnote 13 Scholars have taken up the call to “place” Jewish-American experience with all of its regional and geographic varieties; the Washington story, not yet adequately examined, adds another important layer.Footnote 14 DC did not have the ghettoized, urban Jewish density of places like the Lower East Side of Manhattan or even the heavily Jewish “old neighborhood” of cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. Indeed, the different experiences Jews had in DC versus Baltimore are especially instructive and important because the two cities are often linked, either by family and community connections or by simple geographic proximity.
Baltimore, like industrial cities in general, saw a much larger arrival of working-class, Eastern European Jews at the turn of the twentieth century than did Washington. But Baltimore was probably an exceptional case in and of itself. First, Jews were the largest immigrant group there, and second, the city was unusually segregated.Footnote 15 Jews seeking unskilled or trade-based work in Baltimore’s garment factories arrived in a city whose ethnic and racial differences were so written on the urban landscape that it became a racial and ethnic checkerboard of segregated communities.Footnote 16 Baltimore’s white leaders had pioneered residential segregation ordinances that were so extreme they were struck down as unconstitutional by a U.S. Supreme Court that had already blessed segregation two decades earlier and would support restrictive covenants one decade later.Footnote 17 So it is not surprising that Jews in Baltimore encountered some of the harshest antisemitic housing barriers in the country, including an unbending set of “gentleman’s agreements” among real estate agents and the careful exclusion practices of the monopolistic Roland Park Company that hemmed Jews into the northwest corner of the city regardless of economic or social mobility. This baked-in antisemitism, and resulting ethnic solidarity, ensured that Baltimore Jews would disperse far less than Jews elsewhere when given the chance, even as they participated in postwar urban white flight.Footnote 18
In Washington, housing segregation in general came later, and more haphazardly, because of the presence of the federal government, which did not fully embrace racial segregation until the Wilson administration arrived in 1913.Footnote 19 Moreover, the presence of ethnic whites was muted by a much smaller, and far less working-class, immigrant population. Most Jewish Washingtonians did not arrive in the capital directly “off the boat.” They usually migrated from elsewhere in the United States, and their experiences were shaped less by assimilation and more by encountering the realities of working and owning property in a capital and federal district with an increasingly clear color line.Footnote 20
Moreover, there were fewer Jews in general, as the largest wave of Jews would arrive in Washington not at the turn of the century, as in other cities, but when employment opportunities drew educated, American-born Jews during the New Deal and World War II. Fewer working-class Jews also meant a different politics for the community. There was a small Workmen’s Circle contingent of labor socialists, but, mostly, Jewish Washingtonians were shop owners and white-collar government employees. In this way, Washington was both unique—no other American Jewish community was so tied to government—and also more typical of southern and western Jewish American communities. Until the New Deal offered a wider invitation with thousands of good government jobs, Jews were always a tiny minority living with and among others in all four quadrants of the District. Put simply, we cannot paste the experience of New York or Baltimore Jews onto that of DC’s Jews. There has never been one “Jewish American experience.”
Feelings and Facts in the Federal City
Carefully distinguishing local Jewish American experiences from a singular “normative” experience or from Black American experiences with discrimination is not a denial of the power and possibility of American antisemitism. Washington’s Jews did feel the discomfort of interpersonal prejudice and subtle exclusion in the segregation era, a chill that could undermine a sense of full inclusion and freedom. There were also evident instances of outright discrimination. Unpacking such instances, however, yields crucial differences that, again, do not always show up in feelings or memories of community members. Crucially, Jews in Washington could and did call on their own collective power and their non-Jewish neighbors, which shaped their experiences with discrimination such as racial restrictive covenants.
Two highly publicized stories involving racial restrictive covenants in the DC area in the 1940s, one involving a Jewish family and the other a Black family, illustrate the point. James and Mary Hurd were Black. Aaron Tushin was Jewish. Their stories reflect how the means and degrees of success in fighting housing discrimination for Black and Jewish families were fundamentally different.
The Hurds purchased a large, seven-room, brick rowhouse at 116 Bryant Street in Northwest DC in May 1944. Running southeast from Howard University, Bryant was a quiet street of single-family homes on what was at the time a white block, meaning both that most of the people living there were white and that real estate agents usually did not show homes there to Black buyers. The block was something of a hold out, as the surrounding neighborhood had become increasingly Black in recent years. The whiteness of the 100-block was supposed to be a permanent feature. Builder Middaugh & Shannon’s deeds all included language barring the renting, leasing, selling, transferring, or conveying of the property to any “[N]egro or colored person.”Footnote 21 To sell the homes, William Shannon turned to Shannon & Luchs, the real estate firm his brother Herbert ran with Jewish developer Morton Luchs. “Nowhere else in the entire northwest can you buy a moderate-priced home that overlooks a big government reservoir,” explained one 1910 ad run by Shannon & Luchs.Footnote 22
For the Hurds, finding a home on Bryant Street was a dream come true. James, a sheet metal worker, and Mary, a government clerk, had been looking for a new home throughout the war years with little luck.Footnote 23 The real estate market in Washington was tight for everyone in the 1940s—for African Americans who could not buy just anywhere, even more so.Footnote 24 James Hurd saw that 116 was vacant in spring 1944 and, to his surprise, found a willing agent and seller. Hurd and the real estate agent, Italian immigrant Raphael Urciolo, knew about the covenant, but both decided to ignore it.Footnote 25 For his part, Urciolo believed that Black people should be able to live wherever they could afford to live. He also believed he could make higher commissions by selling to Black buyers, who would pay more for the property since it was hard to find someone to sell to them in that neighborhood. His willingness to sell Black people properties in white neighborhoods cost him his membership in the Washington Real Estate Board, but it earned him clients—and lawsuits.Footnote 26
Lena and Frederic Hodge of 136 Bryant Street sued for the removal of the Hurds for violation of 116 Bryant’s racial restrictive covenant. Their attorney, Henry Gilligan, was already well known for defending covenants, typically through threats that resulted in the retreat of Black families before anyone went to court. Lena Hodge, too, was also an experienced covenant enforcer, having previously prevented neighbors from renting their homes to Black tenants.Footnote 27 The Hodges said they had bought 136 from Shannon & Luchs in 1909, in part, because of the guarantee that their neighbors would be white.Footnote 28 When the Hurds did not move, despite badgering lectures about covenants from Lena Hodge and threatening letters from Gilligan, the Hodges sued to force eviction. The local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by civil rights trailblazer Charles Hamilton Houston and aided by Jewish lawyer Phineas Indritz, took up the Hurds’ defense.
Aaron Tushin moved into his home at 6918 Wilson Lane in Bannockburn Heights, Maryland, with his wife Lucille and their three young children a couple years later, in January 1946. Unlike the Hurds, they were not desperately looking for their first house to own. Their previous home at 4943 Massachusetts Avenue NW in DC was large and situated just north of Spring Valley. Its sale to the Tushins in 1935 earned a shout-out and picture showing the beautiful new home in the Evening Star’s real estate section (without mention that Aaron Tushin was Jewish) (Figure 1).Footnote 29 It is not known if 4943 held any racial covenants, but just six doors down, 4919 did have restrictions against Black buyers. We do not know why the Tushins decided to move that winter, but they settled into Bannockburn Heights comfortably.
Figure 1. Notice of the Tushins’ first home purchase.
Source: “New Residence in Massachusetts Avenue,“ Evening Star, December 7, 1935, B8.
More than a year later, in April 1947, a group of neighbors demanded that Aaron Tushin be evicted from his new home because he was Jewish. Lucille Tushin was not Jewish. She could stay, as could the three kids. But Aaron’s presence violated the clause in the deed of his home barring its use or occupancy by “Jews, Negroes, Persians or Syrians, except as domestic servants.”Footnote 30 No one suggested that Aaron, an examiner at the Patent Office with a degree from MIT, was a domestic servant. The clause had been inserted into the property deeds by the builder, the Bannockburn Heights Improvement Co., in 1936. Nine neighbors filed a “breach of covenant” suit in Montgomery County Circuit Court, citing “irreparable damage” caused by Aaron’s occupancy and his refusal to move despite their “repeated demands.”Footnote 31 Eminent Maryland lawyer Alfred Noyes signed on to defend the Tushins’ right to their home.
Both the Hurds and the Tushins ran up against racial restrictive covenants in the mid-1940s. Both decided to fight with the help of prominent attorneys, rather than quietly move out. Here, the stories of the Hurds and the Tushins diverge in ways that reflect the broader experiences of Black and Jewish homebuyers in the DC area during the Jim Crow era.
The Hurds’ lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, had already won a major covenant case in the District of Columbia. That case involved Jewish homeowners who sought to enforce a racial restrictive covenant.Footnote 32 In Gorewitz v. Hundley (1941), Rebecca and Samuel Gorewitz, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who ran a pawnbroking business, hired Henry Gilligan to sue the Hundleys, a Black family, for violating the covenant on the home next door to theirs on Thirteenth Street in Northwest DC. It was the second time the Gorewitzes had sued to keep their block white.Footnote 33 That Mary and Frederick Hundley had spent $2,300 on home improvements and were local leaders and schoolteachers (Mary boasted degrees from Radcliffe and Middlebury and taught French at the famed Dunbar High School) did not matter in the face of the covenant. As Rebecca Gorewitz explained in court, she was worried about her property values, but the potential depreciation was only her first objection: “The second objection is that we do not want to live next to colored people.”Footnote 34
Houston won the Hundleys’ case on appeal in 1942 by arguing that the Gorewitzes’ neighborhood had changed too much to claim that a single covenant made any difference in property values or neighborhood character. In a rare win for the NAACP against a racial covenant, the DC Circuit Court established a “change of neighborhood” doctrine that found such covenants unenforceable once they could no longer fulfill their original purpose of maintaining a whites-only neighborhood. Whether other courts, or the U.S. Supreme Court, would respect the “change of neighborhood” doctrine was yet to be tested. It was also something of a pyrrhic victory in the fight against segregation. The ruling seemed to affirm the basic principle that neighborhoods are either Black or white, essentially telling the Gorewitzes that their neighborhood was already “too Black” to be “white.”
In 1947, Mary Hundley was interviewed on the DC radio program “Americans All,” about her ordeal. Hundley appeared with Leon Ransom, a local NAACP lawyer. Ransom repeatedly noted that racial restrictive covenants were used against “Negroes and Jews” and even mentioned the Tushin case. But no one on the program noted that the Gorewitzes, the plaintiffs in the Hundleys’ case, were Jewish.Footnote 35 They, like Rebecca Gorewitz herself, saw only white people. “My color, I am strictly white,” Gorewitz had told the court. “I should say I am, for I was born in Poland, and I would like for you to look up in the Polish history, and you will never see any colored people.”Footnote 36
For all of Houston’s legal brilliance and success in the Hundleys’ case, the Hurds lost in December 1945, and the judge voided the sales of not just the Hurds’ home but also those of three other Black families on the same block, whose cases had been lumped with the Hurds’ case. The Hurds, the Savages, the Stewarts, and the Rowes were initially given sixty days to move out. They were ultimately allowed to remain as Houston and the NAACP appealed the ruling, but the threat of eviction hung over all four families for three years. Only a landmark victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 removed that threat. Hurd v. Hodge (1948) was the DC-based companion to the national Shelley v. Kraemer case, in which the Court ruled that racial restrictive covenants violated the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, could not be enforced by government officials. The case did not make covenants illegal nor totally meaningless among buyers, sellers, and agents. However, it did make them useless in state or federal court. Four years after purchasing their homes, the Hurds were finally told that their property rights outweighed the racist sensibilities of their home’s builders and of their white neighbors.
The Tushins did not have to wait so long. Almost immediately, they received support and expressions of solidarity from many of their neighbors. In fact, none of the plaintiffs was a direct neighbor of the Tushins or had even had much contact with them. For example, it took more than fifteen minutes to walk from the Tushins to plaintiff J. Otis Garber’s house at 6622 Braeburn Parkway. Most of the Tushins’ closest neighbors refused to join the suit, some saying that they were offended by the whole thing.Footnote 37 The broader community response was outrage on the Tushins’ behalf—none of the handwringing over the rights of private property owners or property values or neighborhood “character” that typically accompanied such cases involving Black defendants. The Washington office of the Anti-Defamation League reported that the nine plaintiffs were very much in the minority in Bannockburn. The local citizens’ association refused to endorse the suit—surprising since such associations were typically bulwarks of segregationism.Footnote 38 When the plaintiffs were listed in the newspaper, they received harassing phone calls from those offended by their bigotry, including calls that “began with ‘Heil Hitler.’” “The Tushins were also beset with telephone calls,” noted Washington Post reporter Dorothea Andrews, “from persons who offered them legal advice, sympathy, and other aid to combat what these persons called a violation of democratic principles.”Footnote 39 The Tushins no doubt felt frightened and offended. They likely did not feel alone.
So swift and intense was the condemnation of the suit against Aaron Tushin that within four days of the story hitting the papers, the plaintiffs withdrew it.Footnote 40 They blamed the public outcry, which, they said, was making “a racial and religious issue out of a purely legal or contractual matter.”Footnote 41 Interestingly, sometimes the case is categorized as about racial exclusion and other times about religious exclusion—even as the plaintiffs argued it was more dryly a mere “contractual” matter. Aaron Tushin himself saw it as racial: “They contend there is no racial issue involved,” he said. “There must be a racial issue involved. People don’t go around filing suits as intellectual exercises, just to see if the laws are valid.” Plaintiff Garber insisted to the Post that he had “friends of many races and nationalities.” The whole thing had simply gotten out of hand: “I am a Protestant. But the newspapers are fanning this thing into a fire and it isn’t fair. I would feel the same way if somebody built a garage in their front yard. That also would violate the covenant.”Footnote 42 Most of Washington, it appeared, did not share Garber’s parallel between the father of three children and an ill-placed garage.
Tushin’s lawyer, Alfred Noyes, took a bow for American values when the plaintiffs backed off. The suit’s withdrawal was “the result of the power of an aroused American public indignation and an attempt to deprive a citizen of his home because of his religion,” he intoned. “It is gratifying that the American sense of fair play can so effectively come to the aid of a fellow citizen.”Footnote 43 Hymen Goldman, president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, sounded a similar note: “[T]he most heartening element of this particular case [is] that the overwhelming majority of the Bannockburn property owners refused to have anything to do with the action against Mr. Tushin. It is to their credit—and by projection, to the credit of most Americans everywhere—that they did not become unwitting tools for the destruction of the American way of life.”Footnote 44
Noyes’s and Goldman’s universalism is not altogether surprising in 1947. It reflected the emergent postwar, anti-communist liberal politics. Tushin’s case was not really about Jews for Noyes but about the “fair play” that all “citizens” could expect. To the Hurds and other Bryant Street families still facing eviction as they appealed their case to the Supreme Court, this public outrage and quick resolution must have been a bit galling. “It is a sad commentary,” Leon Ransom said on the “Americans All” radio program that year, “that similar indignation does not follow when such covenants are daily used because of the race or color of the purchaser.”Footnote 45 If victims of antisemitism like the Tushins could find some solace in community outrage, they may also have found it in the fact that such cases were exceedingly rare. There are no other known suits forcing the eviction of Jewish homeowners in the Washington area because of a racial restrictive covenant.
Black homeowners simply did not operate in the same housing market as white ones, including white Jews. As a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) market analysis reported in 1940, Washington, DC, may have been a place of relative freedom and decent schooling for African Americans compared to farther south, but these opportunities did not translate to “adequate volume of housing accommodations.” Therefore, concluded the FHA, “the Negro is said to pay more rent for given space of lower quality than do the whites.”Footnote 46 This was the case for African Americans in much of the United States, but it was not the case for Jewish Americans.
We know that Jewish and Black homebuyers were not equally excluded from housing in the capital region because Jews began to take advantage of new suburban developments (both in upper Northwest DC and neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland) in the 1930s, nearly two decades before covenants were deemed unenforceable and forty years before most Black home seekers could even begin to find homes in DC’s suburbs. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, Jewish Washingtonians successively moved from small buildings they owned downtown, to new homes in the leafier residential parts of the Northwest quadrant surrounding Rock Creek Park, and then to new lawns and single-family homes in whites-only areas of Montgomery County.Footnote 47 And they did it all in a period when Black Washingtonians experienced increasing disinvestment, overcrowding, and segregation in the District.Footnote 48
Restrictive Covenants in Collective Memory and in History
Descriptions of racial covenants subtler or less exaggerated than Bernstein’s make plain a collective memory rooted in some measure of equivalence between Black and Jewish experiences. A letter writer to The Washington Post, responding to a report that Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist had a racial restrictive covenant on his Vermont home, explained in 1986, “There are communities all over the country where a Jew or a black with the necessary financial resources cannot buy a house.”Footnote 49 In a story about the bucolic DC neighborhood of Crestwood in 1992, Washington Post reporter Michele Norris noted that the area’s builder, Paul P. Stone, “included restrictive covenants in the deeds that barred Jews and blacks from buying” there. Yet, Norris added, “The stately homes that have graced Crestwood’s sloping streets over the years have been home to many of Washington’s empire builders,” including Jewish car dealer Phil Lustine and Giant Food founder N. M. Cohen.Footnote 50 Lustine was living in his Crestwood home at 1619 Allison Street NW in 1935, and Cohen bought his home down the block in 1938. According to PrologueDC, the homes did have covenants against Black buyers. Stone was not the only developer in Crestwood, either. Jewish builder Max Sugar built there too, and the Lustines and Cohens were not the only Jews living there well before 1945.Footnote 51
Contradictory stories about exclusion and inclusion persist in reports about DC housing discrimination. In describing the history of Rock Creek Forest in Montgomery County, a subdivision built by Jewish developer Sam Eig, the Washington Post wrote in 2000 that, “In its early years, the subdivision attracted a large number of Jews, in part because property deeds had none of the covenants that at that time barred sales of older Chevy Chase homes to blacks, Jews and others.”Footnote 52 The story reflected collective memory. In 1981, Jewish real estate developer Robert Silverman recalled “covenants in all of Chevy Chase that said no Jews, Arabs, Blacks, Syrians, Chinese, et cetera, could live in any of these houses.”Footnote 53 Yet few homes in Chevy Chase, on the DC or Maryland sides, actually carried antisemitic restrictions. Indeed, Jacob Zarin had bought 5626 Connecticut Avenue NW in 1937, and Jewish builder Albert Small built three houses on the 5800 block of Nevada Avenue NW all the way back in 1926.Footnote 54 Moreover, Eig—who was so synonymous with DC’s suburban developments that he earned the nickname “Mr. Montgomery County” and had a section of highway through the county named for him—did, in fact, restrict his Rock Creek Forest homes against Black buyers.Footnote 55 It simply is not true that Rock Creek Park had “none of the covenants”; it just did not have any that barred Jews.
More recent and even occasional scholarly descriptions of racial covenants in the DC area follow a standard but misleading description, usually something along the lines of, “Covenants prohibiting the conveyance of property to African Americans, and often to Jews or members of other groups.”Footnote 56 What defines “often”? What if it was not that often? Indeed, what if it was quite rare? Nationally, that would seem to be the case. Historian Colin Gordon’s unusually careful study of racial restrictive covenants in Missouri and Iowa found restrictions against Jews there to be “relatively rare” due to “early and successful challenges” by Midwestern Jews against them. Sometimes, the rarity was simply the result of a lack of concern and basic boilerplate language. In the city of St. Louis, for example, standardized racial covenant language barred nearly all Black buyers, but not Jewish buyers. In Iowa City, things were a bit more ambiguous because two “idiosyncratic” parcels did bar “Jews and colored people,” but the vast majority of the city did not.Footnote 57
In one sense, all this ambiguity is understandable. It can be difficult to be precise about housing discrimination, not only because the industry had subtle modes of discriminating, but also because words like “minorities,” “non-Caucasians,” and “nonwhite” were used interchangeably with “Negro” or “colored” in racist housing practices nationally in the 1930s and 1940s. Segregationists who wrote restrictions, and governmental policymakers who embedded them in lending and insurance guidelines, were not necessarily careful to distinguish types of minorities. Nor were they necessarily any clearer about whether Jews were a “racial” or “religious” minority than Jews themselves were at the time. Indeed, Gordon notes the “fuzziness” of the common term “Caucasian,” which restrictionists interpreted as they saw fit, family by family, house by house.Footnote 58 Federal underwriting guidelines simply instructed underwriters and agents to avoid “inharmonious racial groups.” The FHA established four categories for assessing risk: “White,” “Negro,” “Foreign,” and “Mixed.”Footnote 59 Were Jews white? Foreign? Part of a mixture? The answer was in the eye of the beholder (i.e., the local real estate agent, developer, and FHA appraiser) and varied dramatically with and across metropolitan areas. Sometimes Jews were left out of restrictive covenants simply because there were not enough of them to “threaten” an area. Sometimes they were left out because developers did not see all Jews as a problem or as “non-white.” Leading developer of elite, white neighborhoods J. C. Nichols of Kansas City, Missouri, for example, saw some Jews as worthy buyers.Footnote 60 In fact, the national “model restrictive covenant” written in 1927 by Chicago real estate lawyer Nathan MacChesney barred Black people only.Footnote 61 Since all restrictive covenants barred Black ownership but only some barred Jewish ownership, these terms might not be so interchangeable. Sometimes restrictionists meant Jews and sometimes they did not, and it is only in the outcomes or in the specific language of deeds written in particular times and places that we can find out. But it is worth finding out because memory and myth have filled in gaps of knowledge, gaps that affect how we view history in places like DC.
To start, we need to ask, where, exactly, were those properties that barred Jewish ownership? Nearly all the 1.3 percent of properties in DC were in the Spring Valley and Wesley Heights neighborhoods of upper Northwest DC (Figure 2). These neighborhoods, developed by the prestigious firm of W.C. & A.N. Miller, were created in the 1930s to be among the wealthiest neighborhoods in the District (Figure 3). The Millers used the strictest “protective covenants” in their “exclusive” and “restricted” properties, including overtly antisemitic restrictions, and leaned heavily on “colonial” and “plantation” designs to connect their developments to an idealized, white past.Footnote 62 The Millers’ restrictions kept Spring Valley elite—and the purview of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)s—but they also made it notorious. The State Department viewed the well-known restricted neighborhood near Embassy Row as a source of embarrassment as the Cold War dawned.Footnote 63 In 1959, psychologist and pollster Arthur D. Kirsch chose Spring Valley as a survey site in a project funded by the Anti-Defamation League to gauge support for antisemitic covenants. Kirsch chose Spring Valley because it was “a long established, and widely known restricted community.”Footnote 64 Spring Valley became a symbol of Jewish exclusion in DC. When Jewish DC journalist Ben W. Gilbert wrote about racial restrictive covenants remaining in real estate deeds in 1969, he reproduced a Miller deed for Spring Valley.Footnote 65 But the Miller deed’s explicit antisemitism was not representative of most racial covenants in DC, and Miller properties dominated just a few blocks in neighborhoods only the wealthiest buyers could afford.
What about the suburbs? Did Bernstein’s 90 percent number ring truer in Maryland, where Jewish Washingtonians were increasingly headed by the 1940s? In 2023, the Montgomery County Planning Department sampled restrictive covenants for plats, or land maps, recorded from 1873-1952 inside the Beltway. Their data shows that 24 percent of plats with restrictive covenants included language that precluded ownership by Jews, with most built in the 1930s.Footnote 66 This was a bigger number than in the District, for sure. As in the city, identifying where those restrictions reigned most thoroughly in the suburbs turns up the County’s most expensive addresses in the western sections south of the Beltway, such as Bannockburn Heights, Westmoreland Hills, and Sumner (developed by W.C. & A.N. Miller). Without a doubt, affluent DC Jews looking to claim addresses in the area’s “best” neighborhoods could run up against an antisemitic ceiling in the 1940s.
Figure 2. Washington, DC, and vicinity transportation map, 1947.
Source: Geological Survey, U.S., and United States Public Roads Administration, “Washington, D.C., and vicinity transportation map” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1947), Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/87695585/.
Figure 3. Spring Valley ad.
Source: Evening Star, May 20, 1939, B5.
“Gentiles Only”
American life broadly, nor life in Washington, DC, has never been entirely free of antisemitism. Prejudice, suspicion, the discomforts of being a minority, and social exclusion (country clubs, summer resorts) have been the defining features of American antisemitism, all rising and falling periodically over time. Jewish home buyers could be victims of prejudice and hate by the real estate industry. The Conference of Developers of High-Class Residential Property, an early-twentieth-century trade organization for the builders of some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the country, routinely voted not to sell to Jews, though several members admitted that they made exceptions to the rule for “certain” Jews. These builders said they feared an influx of Jews that would lower the desirability—and property values—of their developments by driving away Christians and leaving spaces to be filled only by less desirable buyers (more Jews). As housing scholar Paige Glotzer has explained, it was precisely the apparent whiteness of most Jews, and their increasing affluence by the 1920s, that made them such a potential threat. They could easily “infiltrate” and change a neighborhood’s character.Footnote 67 Whether or not the builders themselves harbored antisemitic beliefs, some were sure their potential buyers did.
By the 1930s, those potential buyers in Washington increasingly included Jews. New Deal and wartime government agencies welcomed Jewish white-collar workers, a relief from the occupational exclusion that barred Jews from many professional firms in cities like Chicago and New York. But as thousands of Jews moved to the tight housing market of the capital in the 1930s and 1940s, singles looking for rooms to rent faced a market riddled with “gentiles only” signs—many more than before, or after, this period. A quick scan of the ads for furnished rooms on one page of the Evening Star in 1943 turns up around sixty “gentiles only” requirements. This was nowhere near a majority of rooms among the hundreds available, but enough people made clear that they did not want to share living quarters with Jews to give a chilling sense of discrimination.Footnote 68 That year was, in fact, the height of such overt antisemitism in DC’s rental market advertising. Antisemitism, always persistent, is also periodic. “Gentiles only” requirements in apartment advertisements in DC papers began to creep up significantly in the 1930s, peaking during the war, and dropping off in the early postwar period (Figure 4). Nevertheless, the antisemitic restrictions clearly rose as the number of Jews moving to DC was also growing.
Figure 4. Newspapers.com search for “gentiles only” mentions in Washington papers between 1900 and 1968.
Source: Newspapers.com
Thus, as the “gentiles only” ads and the Tushin case indicate, mid-century Washington was not free of overt antisemitism. Antisemitic provocateur Gerald L.K. Smith held a rally at the Washington Monument in August 1947, and Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac, was home to the menacing American Nazi Party and its own demagogue, George Lincoln Rockwell.Footnote 69 And yet, Jews in Washington, DC, in the postwar period, notes Hasia Diner, “possessed enough confidence in themselves, in their non-Jewish neighbors, and in the structure of American society that they could press their claims for fairness and non-discrimination.”Footnote 70 But often, they did not need to: the Jewish Community Council found that its best response to Jew-hating, race baiters like Smith and Rockwell was to ignore them.Footnote 71
In cases where Jews were specifically barred by covenants, many overcame the restrictions in ways Black buyers could not.Footnote 72 Leo Bernstein’s oral history, in fact, goes on to recount Jewish lawyers, agents, and developers pushing past antisemitism throughout DC in the 1930s, well before Black families had any hope of overcoming discrimination. Irene Kaplan’s Moroccan Jewish family managed to buy their house in Northwest DC because their neighbors assumed they were French.Footnote 73 Another Jewish Washingtonian, Robert Rosenfeld, remembered the day, in 1932, when his family moved into their home in Chevy Chase:
As we were viewing our new house, a delegation of 3 or 4 men and a woman approached us and told us no Jews were allowed in this neighborhood. My Dad reached into his front breast pocket and pulled out a copy of the Constitution and said that his lawyer, Hyman Goldstein, was ready to go to court to defend his right to live here… [Soon,] All the Jewish families moved next to our house.Footnote 74
The Rosenfelds lived there, alongside many Jews, for decades.
DC Jews have regularly drawn 1948 as a key line for them—the moment the Supreme Court released them from rigid restrictions. Yet even in areas where antisemitic restrictive covenants have been found, such as north of Shepherd Park and west of Sixteenth Street NW, Jews began purchasing homes before the Supreme Court ruling in May 1948. For example, PrologueDC found antisemitic restrictions throughout Square 2746, a triangle of about twenty-five homes bounded by Kalmia Road, Myrtle Street, and Sixteenth Street, an area Leo Bernstein also recalled as restricting Jews.Footnote 75 And yet, Jewish Washingtonian Dan Pollin moved to a house at 1634 Myrtle Street NW in that very plot in March 1948, before the ruling. Louis Etelson moved next door in May. Over the next three years, six of the eight restricted plots were bought by Jewish families.Footnote 76 The 1950 U.S. Census found Jews in almost all of the DC area’s most restricted neighborhoods, such as government economists Harry Weiss and Albert Hirschman, both of whose families lived in Kenwood, Maryland, and Atomic Energy Commission chairman David Lilienthal, who lived in DC’s exclusive American University Park neighborhood. Less prominent, if no less wealthy, Jews had broken through too. Furrier Jules Rendelman’s family lived in a Miller-built home in Spring Valley itself.Footnote 77 These were exceptions: wealthy people in wealthy neighborhoods. But that is exactly the point. Antisemitic restrictions predominated in wealthy neighborhoods, but by 1950, wealthy Jews lived where wealthy white, Christian people lived.
The speed of this movement, with the pre-1948 data from DC and its suburbs, suggests that Jewish housing mobility and suburbanization was not so much an indication of the meaning of a legal shift brought about by Shelley as it was an indication of the permeability of the pre-Shelley barriers for Jews. They could access decent housing as their affluence began to match their ambitions. Indeed, Diner notes that “as early as 1944, [the Jewish Community] Council took note of the suburbanization of Washington Jewry and, in 1947, it founded a suburban committee to work with the needs of the budding communities” in Montgomery and Fairfax Counties.Footnote 78
The Jewish Community Council was correct that the move to desirable neighborhoods in Northwest DC turned out to be part of a northward march of Jews out of the District and into the suburbs of adjoining Maryland counties that began even before the end of World War II. Within a decade of the war’s end, most DC-area Jews lived in the whites-only suburbs. American Jews everywhere in the United States leapt at suburban housing, with one out of every three Jews leaving cities for the suburban developments between 1945 and 1965, the highest rate of any ethnic group. In ways that Black home seekers simply could not, Jews could and did overcome barriers even before the Shelley decision ruled racial covenants unenforceable in 1948, and certainly before the Fair Housing Act (FHA) outlawed housing discrimination in 1968.Footnote 79 In 1950, the FHA removed its endorsement of racial covenants from its underwriting manual in line with the Shelley ruling, but this did not greatly change real estate practices for Black homebuyers. One way to see the effectiveness of housing discrimination is to note that Montgomery County was 36 percent Black in 1890 and 3 percent Black in 1960, even as the county’s population overall increased dramatically. Meanwhile, by 1960, the County had become home to the area’s largest Jewish community.Footnote 80
Jewish Developers
The relationship between history and collective memory regarding restrictive covenants becomes all the more complex when Jewish real estate developers come into the picture. Jews built and sold homes in the Washington real estate market and, like many of their non-Jewish counterparts, used racial restrictive covenants to keep their developments white. In addition to Sam Eig, leading Jewish real estate developers Morris Cafritz, Carl Freeman, Abraham Kay, Morton Luchs, and Joseph Shapiro all restricted at least some of their developments against Black buyers and renters in the DC area.Footnote 81 The restrictions put in place by Jewish builders were not a secret (Figure 5). Advertisements for Cafritz’s elegant Greenwich Forest development in Montgomery County in 1933 claimed, “the advantages of a restricted community, the exclusiveness of which is maintained by restrictions for architectural harmony and social control.” In 1939, Cafritz assured potential buyers that the “exclusive character” of the neighborhood would be “perpetuated through sensible restrictions, rigidly enforced.”Footnote 82 Eig’s Rock Creek Forest in Silver Spring, Maryland, was advertised in 1942 as “ideally located and sensibly restricted.”Footnote 83
Figure 5. Greenwich Forest ad.
Source: Evening Star, September 26, 1936, C5.
Abe Kay, who built the Indian Spring Club Estates neighborhood in Silver Spring in 1940, restricted his neighborhood to “Caucasians” in the original deeds, which, in Kay’s mind, did not exclude Jews.Footnote 84 Saul Mindel moved to Kay’s development in 1941 after catching a “hint of anti-Semitism” from a real estate agent in the District. “I told him we’d been out to Indian Spring Club Estates and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, there are a lot of Jews moving out there.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m Jewish.’ And of course he was embarrassed, which I enjoyed.”Footnote 85 Mindel’s pleasure in the agent’s embarrassment captures the complexity: On the one hand, antisemitism was a part of life in DC, and Jews simply looking for a home could find themselves facing prejudice head on. On the other hand, Mindel could confidently move forward since families like his had other options, including desirable houses built by Jews in brand new suburbs—all-white suburbs thanks to covenants.
Rose Kramer remembered Indian Springs as similarly open in 1940, without mention of the covenants against non-white buyers:
[Abe Kay] built this community—about 180 homes. A very nice little community, to which were attracted many people like my husband and me—young, Jewish couples with one child, two children—who wanted to leave apartments and go into homes. I would say about 40 Jewish families bought homes in this little development. … That is where we began to build a Jewish community—not consciously, maybe partly because they couldn’t move to some of the other areas in Montgomery. I don’t know how much the covenants bothered them, or where they were. But these were nice, inexpensive homes and great for raising a family, children, yards and all that.Footnote 86
Kay’s neighborhood was an opportunity for young, upwardly mobile Jewish families. Covenants were part of the landscape for someone like Kramer, but also essentially irrelevant, since they likely restricted properties ordinary families like hers could not afford. Indian Spring offered “a nice little community” and an affordable escape from apartments and denser downtown neighborhoods. Importantly, this was the reverse of the pattern for anti-Black covenants, which were more common in denser, more affordable areas being reserved for middle-class white families.Footnote 87 Middle-class Jewish families operated in a very different housing market from middle-class Black families.
Jewish real estate developers were not any different from most other white developers in this era. After all, historians have shown that broader governmental policy, including federal housing insurance underwriting guidelines, as well as banking and real estate industry standards, encouraged the use of racial restrictive covenants. Not all Jewish developers racially restricted their properties, but those who did could point to FHA guidelines for “best practices.” At first, these standards were responses to the wishes of white homeowners, but in New Deal housing agencies, real estate business leaders worked with social scientists and government policymakers to promote a specious “property values” logic that most abided.Footnote 88
The interwar industry and governmental ideology that “the market” required segregation, therefore, was certainly not the invention of Jewish developers in DC. They were part of what legal historian Clement Vose called a “network of interests supporting covenants and restrictive agreements in Washington,” including the Washington Real Estate Board.Footnote 89 In 1934, the Board’s code of ethics stated that “No property in a white section should ever be sold, rented, advertised, or offered to colored people.”Footnote 90 Indeed, as early as the 1910s, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) codified, in its infamous Article 34, a bedrock belief of professionalizing real estate agents that, “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”Footnote 91 NAREB’s membership included Jewish members, but no one questioned the basic assumptions of segregated real estate.Footnote 92 The Washington Real Estate Board’s code was actually narrower than NAREB’s, much more specific to governing white and “colored” spaces. The whiteness of Jews has been contingent and sometimes debated, but never have European-descended Jews been defined as “colored.” The Washington Board’s code, just as in schools and public transportation, left Jews distinctly on the white side of the capital’s color line.
An immigrant like Sam Eig may have felt no choice as he sought to join and succeed in the racist real estate marketplace. “Faced with a choice between liberal politics and their own acculturation,” notes historian Marc Dollinger, “Jews almost always chose the latter.”Footnote 93 But Jewish developers in the DC area in the 1930s and 1940s were not mere bystanders or followers, either. They were significant players in a rapidly developing region flush with cash and influence. Both Morton Luchs and Morris Cafritz served on the Washington Real Estate Board in the 1920s and 1930s. Luchs served a term as board president in 1937–1938. Cafritz also served on the executive committee of the local builders’ association, alongside Spring Valley builder A.N. Miller.Footnote 94 The cohort of Jewish builders and agents helped to develop substantial sections of the city and the suburbs before and after World War II. Thus, when Carl Freeman responded to civil rights picketing at his properties in Maryland and Virginia in 1966 by saying he supported open housing but would not open his apartment buildings to Black residents without broad legislation, he was both acknowledging the structural and systemic basis of racist housing practices and, also, denying his own substantial capacity to influence those practices.Footnote 95
The racial views of twentieth-century Washington Jews ran the gamut, as with most white-identified groups in the area. A Cafritz Construction employee reported in 1938 that the company refused to hire Black carpenters because it did not deem them intelligent enough.Footnote 96 On the other hand, some organizations affiliated with the Jewish Community Council as well as local Jewish activists Annie Stein and Marvin Caplan and lawyers Phineas Indritz, Philip Elman, and Philip B. Perlman were conspicuously among those fighting to end anti-Black racial segregation and discrimination in Washington.Footnote 97 Rather than trying to measure the racism of white Jews against African Americans in Washington, the point is that the outcomes for the two groups in general differed markedly and cannot be lumped together in a shared history of exclusion. There is no question that Black Washingtonians found themselves increasingly segregated and disadvantaged for most of the twentieth century. Jewish Washingtonians, on the other hand, routinely found new homes, particularly as building expanded coming out of World War II.Footnote 98
The Meaning of Memory
This article takes up one piece of collective memory, modern urban and suburban development, and what historians can and should know about that past. Jews in Washington, DC, have fostered a memory of urban and suburban development, in particular their degrees of discrimination and involvement, that does not match what historians know. That breach is important because it bears upon the present and raises interesting questions about American history and Jewish identity formation within it.
Closer to the segregation era, before memory blended with experience, Jewish Washingtonians did acknowledge differences from Black Americans in their own experiences with discrimination. In 1946, as NAACP lawyers were mounting their case in Hurd v. Hodge, a committee of the Jewish Community Council discussed the meaning of the covenants for local Jews. “A long and general discussion in which everyone participated followed,” read the meeting minutes. “It was pointed out that the number of restrictive covenants locally against Jews was small and that the areas of restrictive covenants [against Jews] were limited.” Attendees did discuss what appeared, correctly, to be a growth of covenants in suburbs, and they agreed, reasonably, that the existence of antisemitic covenants was “not a healthy condition,” even if Jews had space to live.Footnote 99 So, while committee members were understandably concerned about antisemitic housing restrictions, they also concluded that Jews had enough space and the problem, for Jews anyway, was relatively minor.
Nevertheless, over time restrictive covenants became not just totems of antisemitism and exclusion but also plot points in narratives of overcoming and democratic promise for Jewish Washingtonians. For example, Aaron Goldman, wealthy from a successful vending machine and food-supply business, recalled decades later being refused a house in Spring Valley in the 1940s.Footnote 100 The Goldmans found another in the nearby Forest Hills neighborhood. “It was a very desirable section,” Goldman said. “As a result, it became heavily, or fairly heavily, Jewish because it was an attractive neighborhood: suburban, wooded, yet close to the city.”Footnote 101 In 2010, Daniel Solomon held a similar memory about Forest Hills.
This [neighborhood was] called Hanukkah Heights and this—our grandparents and parents bought here [on Albermarle] in the, you know, just after the war because that’s when this land was—there were covenants on the land that Jews couldn’t buy a lot of land, any of the land, a lot of the land west of the park, Rock Creek Park, Jews couldn’t buy, actually were covenants on the properties.Footnote 102
Solomon’s wavering between a claim that Jews “couldn’t buy a lot of land, any of the land, a lot of the land…” is revealing. Even so firm a memory of the pain of exclusion was not really fixed in his mind. Importantly, this is not because he was deliberately crafting a “lie.” Rather, antisemitic suspicion was real and painful, but how to explain its extent and ultimate meaning was difficult, in part because Jews had overcome these barriers. Solomon recalled, “Those [covenants] were broken around that time and a lot of Jews moved into this neighborhood. So it was called Hanukah Heights.”Footnote 103 Understandably, there is pride in this story: Jews were not wanted in some places, but they managed to make their own space elsewhere.
Goldman’s memory went a bit further to something more universal. “[In] Forest Hills,” he said, “there were no covenants there.” But that was not true. There were covenants, just not against Jews. The restrictions only applied to Black people.Footnote 104 Again, Goldman’s memory reflected a broader belief that Jews faced the same restrictions as Black people. If Jews could live there, he reasoned, then there must not have been covenants against anyone. It was an assumption that could inspire empathy and a sense of obligation to fight inequality. “As a teenager completely innocent in the ways of the world, I sensed I was being treated unfairly in the business world because of my religion,” remembered Leo Bernstein, “which made me particularly sensitive to unfair treatment.”Footnote 105 Goldman agreed and abhorred racial restrictions for anyone, not just Jews. As president of the Jewish Community Council in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he actively allied the Council with the Black freedom struggle and supported desegregation efforts in the District. Yet his oral history makes no mention of the absence of Black people living in his neighborhood.
Even the radical lobbyist Marvin Caplan, who helped ensure passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, was capable of furthering contradictory and incomplete memories. In a 1980s description of a section of Northwest DC called Shepherd Park, among the first stops for Jews leaving older neighborhoods downtown starting in the 1930s, Caplan explained that in the 1940s, “Almost all the deeds [for Shepherd Park houses] contained restrictive covenants designed to keep out ‘any [N]egro or colored person or person of [N]egro blood extraction,’ Jews, and other Semitic people.”Footnote 106 The flower-named streets of Shepherd Park were indeed originally planned by racial restrictionist L. E. Brueninger. Yet Caplan’s description might have come as a surprise to Morris Berger and Harry Berger, who each built homes on Iris and Geranium Streets, respectively, in 1938. William Oshinsky’s home on Iris Street hosted a meeting of the B’nai Israel Sisterhood featuring Rabbi Henry Segal in May 1944. Simon Chaiken moved into his house on Floral Street in 1947. That same year, real estate developer Charles E. Smith built his own Shepherd Park home at 1328 Holly Street NW, the deed of which restricted against Black buyers but not against Jews like Smith.Footnote 107 Indeed, perhaps some awareness of these details forced Caplan to revise this blanket claim a few pages later. “In the early 1940s,” Caplan notes, “despite restrictive covenants, Jews began to move into Shepherd Park.”Footnote 108 Evidence suggests that most properties in Shepherd Park did not bar Jews, so most did not move there “despite” covenants. Perhaps even more important, however, is Caplan’s casual description of Jews’ ability to ignore covenants before they were ruled unenforceable or made illegal.
Emphasizing the reach and effect of antisemitic restrictive covenants has served a historical function. It captures a sense of exclusion some felt. “Washington was a very gentile city,” is how New York Times and DC-born columnist Frank Rich put it.Footnote 109 Yet emphasis on Jewish exclusion and difference also bound postwar American Jews together in an age of mobility, integration, and suburbanization—and, of course, coming to terms with the horrors of the Holocaust—that threatened Jewish cohesion and coherence. As many Jews moved out of “the old neighborhood,” shared memories of antisemitism maintained Jewish distinctiveness even as fewer and fewer lived distinctively Jewish lives.Footnote 110 It also made the Jewish-American story legible. American Jews “found new Jewish purpose and a new way of explaining Jewishness through the role of model minority,” notes historian Lila Corwin Berman.Footnote 111 Facing discrimination but pushing past it to become stable, patriotic homeowners was one way to live into the model. Indeed, Jewish homebuying—especially single-family homes in the suburbs—could be presented not as a threat to WASP exclusiveness but as a universal symbol of American democracy and social mobility, despite the lack of universality of their experiences.Footnote 112
By the 1980s, when Leo Bernstein sat for his interview, the expression of shared victimization by some Jews was also a pointed response to Black Washingtonians who were critical of Israel and Zionism and questioning whether Jews were ever really victims. “I didn’t get in but I clawed my way up,” Bernstein recalled. “I called the unseen elite the cliff dwellers. I never saw them or knew who they were sometimes, but it seemed like they had all been in place for hundreds of years.” Bernstein’s self-understanding was a double marginalization, particularly in majority-Black DC with its outspoken Black mayor, Marion Barry:
I don’t think the cliff dwellers thought about crushing me. They didn’t see me at first. But there I was selling houses and giving loans to people of all colors and religious beliefs. I’m sure the things I did shocked them, but I guess I was beneath their dignity. I didn’t even know they existed until I grew big enough to be within their sights. They never got a chance to get rid of me, though, because the city’s black population came in and took the whole thing over, and I was out with the rest of them.Footnote 113
Neither “in” among the elite, nor appreciated by fellow subalterns, Jews were separate. This sense of outsider-ness was an important idea to those who feared, understandably, that antisemitism would be as destructive in the United States as it had been in Europe. “Jews, no matter how successful,” explains historian Leonard Dinnerstein, “were always wary that some crisis or other in a given nation would lead to contraction of rights, severe restrictions, or even expulsion.”Footnote 114 If Jews were white and privileged, who would believe that they had also faced prejudice; that they, too, had barriers to overcome? How would Jews gather allies in the inevitable and unending fight against antisemitism if people saw them as undeserving of aid and sympathy?
The alignment of Black and Jewish experiences in the memories of Bernstein and others reflected not just a concern for universal rights but a specific narrative of Jewish victimhood. As scholars of American Jewish culture and politics have argued, the rise of Black Power and wars that seemed to threaten Israel’s existence in the late 1960s and early 1970s drew many American Jews into an identity politics that emphasized not the universal but the particular. This “white ethnic revival” not only produced cultural expressions of group identity but also surfaced memories of exclusion for a group that had come to sit decidedly in the comforts of American affluence. Stories of struggle bought inclusion in a national narrative of overcoming hardship that had formed an American creed with roots as far back as the Puritans in New England, the survivors at Jamestown, and the “pioneers” in the West.Footnote 115 Jews have been victims of the worst kinds of atrocities, and even in the United States, they have felt threatened. In the flattening of the impact and meaning of restrictive covenants, we see then both a universalism that draws together the scars of racist and antisemitic exclusion and even national identity, as well as a particularism that reasserts Jewish victimhood.
Conclusion
Antisemitic housing restrictions were humiliating and served as a reminder of the suspicion up-and-coming Jews elicited from Christians in Washington, DC, its suburbs, and in many other areas of the country. Awful, to be sure. But the question is why collective memory transforms this awfulness into a simplistic equivalency between Black and Jewish access to housing or social mobility. The barriers in certain neighborhoods did not exclude Jews from the markers of social mobility in the mid-twentieth-century United States, as the far more common restrictions did for African Americans. DC’s Jews were not barred from the single-family homes and the suburban developments that private banks, federal policymakers, and mainstream American culture deemed “good” and “decent” housing. They were not “stuck” in older neighborhoods or crowded apartments that they desperately wanted to leave and could afford to leave. Eligible for FHA-backed mortgages and G.I. Bill loans, and with access to private financing, Jews’ housing matched their social and economic mobility. They were neither ghettoized (lumped together regardless of desire to move or ability to pay) nor forced to endure housing they wanted to escape—any more than anyone else in the tight housing market of the 1940s. Yet incidents of exclusion from the most exclusive neighborhoods form the nucleus of a community narrative. The feeling of exclusion was passed down through families despite falling barriers and rising property ownership, even in those exclusive neighborhoods.
What is lost in a memory of victimhood that does not fit the history of lived experience? Most important, we risk diminishing and de-contextualizing experience. Jews in the United States have faced prejudice with periodic discrimination that created barriers for some and discomfort and anxiety for many. Antisemitism has, for centuries, sent Jews hiding and packing and, often enough, to their deaths. But, despite this long history and the attendant trauma it has imbued in successive generations, antisemitism is neither transhistorical nor translocal. Jews have not suffered in exactly the same way in every place and every time. That is to say, hate has a context, and when we lose track of the context, we lose track of truth and experience.
Jewish American whiteness has been conditional, frequently threatened by antisemitism that lurked in American culture, from street fights in ethnically mixed neighborhoods to the wood-paneled rooms of private clubs and universities. But conditional is not the same as absent. Jewish whiteness has also been real and, often enough, determinative. Washington, DC’s struggles to ensure equitable housing and freedom and security for all of its residents for more than two centuries are not served by false equivalencies any more than they are by grievance competitions. Instead, knowing precisely when and how some groups have succeeded where others have lost out illuminates the real barriers and real solutions of the past and the present—even if reaching for such illumination forces us to confront uncomfortable truths. If we can get what happened right, if we can separate feelings from events and assumptions from facts, we unlock not just history but also the conspiracies and misunderstandings that spread hate. We also develop a language for difficult conversations, language that can be used to protect and preserve the humanity of every person.
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