Module 5: Poetics and Politics of Urban Spaces
  Lecture 32: Louis Wirth (1927): The Ghetto
 
Generation plays the most crucial role in the Ghetto. Where contact between the Jews and non- Jews have continued for a few generations Ghetto disintegrate due to the process of participation in the same world of education, commerce and the arts. Intermarriage also poses a threat to the community. Wirth discusses the notion of the ‘outsider’ that Jewish people developed as a result of being inhabitants of two worlds. The social distance they felt from the Ghetto was a matter of class. Very often they lived on the fringe of two worlds. This creativity of an ‘outsider’ is reflected in the works of Jewish intellectuals. Some people go through an interesting dynamic when they leave the Ghettos get ‘converted’ into a non-Jewish world but very often they come back with a broken heart. The renegade slowly finds his way back into the community.

Though old Jewish Ghettos are no longer a viable community, the Ghettos are being created by the new immigrants. In this context the Ghetto is created by economic and not political bondage. In Chicago in the shadow of the CBD lies a densely populated rectangle of crowded area, it is the immigrant colony or the Ghetto. The process of growth of new immigrants resulted in association between Jews and other ethnic groups. There is a process of filtering that takes place here too. Property is passing through the hands of Germans, Irish, Poles, Italians, Greeks and the Afro-Americans.

Poles and Jews detest each other thoroughly but can trade with each other successfully. Afro-Americans drift to abandoned areas. No resistance was offered by the Jews and other immigrants who have not yet discovered the colour line.