Slowly the openings became larger. Eventually one portion of the kitchen ceiling was just a collection of gaping holes. Then dead mice began falling through, and the Rodriguez family understood: Rats–the whole neighborhood was infested with rats, and in this ramshackle two-story house on Miller Street in the Pilsen area they had taken over the ceiling and floors.
So Julia Rodriguez, the 53-year-old matriarch of the family, entered
”the lottery.” Not the money game operated by the State of Illinois but the lottery known by residents of Pilsen as a chance at decent housing offered by the 18th Street Development Corporation. Using neighborhood construction trainees, the nonprofit Hispanic housing group rehabilitates slum apartments and rents them at affordable rates. And a lottery determines the ”winners”
from its long waiting list of qualified applicants.
Last winter Senora Rodriguez won. On the last day of her old lease she toured the rundown, rodent- and roach-infested Miller Street premises she and her family had occupied for 18 years. The blackened gridiron on which she flipped tortillas had not yet been packed. In many ways she was sorry to leave what had been home. But she knew her new apartment around the corner on Cullerton Street would be better for her family.
Completely rehabilitated, the Cullerton Street three-flat features a white sandblasted exterior highlighted by ornate wooden railings. Inside, the three-bedroom apartment offers plenty of light and space. New insulated picture windows are large and splendidly trimmed. The floor, salvaged from a gutted park district gymnasium, is blond hardwood, and the living room wall is white brick. ”Everything will be better at the new place,” says Senora Rodriguez. She knows whom to thank for the new residence–the 18th Street Development Corporation. But when asked who had made it possible for 18th Street to accomplish what it had, she guesses, ”City Hall.”
She is wrong. This model urban rescue project is facilitated not by City Hall but by the Jewish community, in this case the Jewish Council for Urban Affairs (JCUA). Since 1973 JCUA has helped 18th Street determine a
neighborhood action agenda, build staff and gain access to the government programs and foundation grants needed to acquire run-down properties and train neighborhood people to rehab them. As 18th Street administrator Linda Garza happily confirms, ”Without JCUA, I don`t think we could have done it.”
When informed that Jewish people are involved, Julia Rodriguez smiles and concedes she can`t imagine why Jews are helping the Hispanic community. Her only explanation: ”They must have big hearts. I think these Jews are very good Christians.”
Cooperation between the JCUA and 18th Street Corporation is just one area of a little-known, suddenly growing realm of coalition building between Jewish and Hispanic groups. The facts:
— Jewish involvement helped the 1992 Committee successfully lobby against the proposed 1992 Chicago World`s Fair, which threatened to displace and disrupt Hispanic neighborhoods.
— Jews helped Hispanics find jobs in the U.S. Postal Service at a time when Latino employment there was minuscule.
— Middle-class Jewish kids from Glenview have traveled down to Pilsen to join Hispanic teenagers in painting over graffiti.
— On the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill that is so anathema to most Hispanics but in many ways so precious to many Jews, the two communities nonetheless worked as lobbying partners in Congress.
— After completing a special fact-finding trip to Israel, a group of prominent Hispanics expressed solidarity with the Jewish community and support for Israel.
— All 13 members of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus sent a special request to President Reagan just before the Geneva summit asking him to raise the issue of Jewish emigration from the USSR with Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev. The Caucus also supported earlier Jewish efforts to cancel the President`s controversial visit to Bitburg, West Germany where Nazi troops are buried.
In many ways the relationship is still embryonic. But it is growing so fast that B`nai B`rith`s Anti-Defamation League now publishes articles of mutual interest in a Spanish-language newsletter entitled Nuevo Encuentro. And the American Jewish Committee in New York employs an Argentinian Jew full time to translate all press releases for the Spanish press across the country.
Jewish inner-city social programs and minority relations have always been thought of as an almost exclusively black-Jewish affair. For decades the weight of Jewish philanthropy and social action in fact has been concentrated in the struggle against discriminatory conditions that have oppressed blacks. But the old black-Jewish coalition is rapidly deteriorating, though how rapidly is a matter of debate.
You can talk to Jewish hard-liners such as Rabbi David Lincoln of Wilmette`s prestigious Beth Hillel congregation. ”The black community has been supporting those who seek to destroy us,” says Rabbi Lincoln. ”Look at Jesse Jackson supporting the PLO. There`s nothing wrong with being black, but there`s a whole lot wrong with being black and anti-Semitic. I hope it`s a small percentage of the black community. But their political leaders are almost all–to a man, from Andrew Young to Louis Farrakhan–anti-Semitic.”
Or you can talk to Jewish moderates such as Sol Brandzel, former president of the Chicago Board of Education, currently Midwest president of the Amer-ican Jewish Congress. Brandzel concedes that ”right now, the relationship is a frustrating one. While it`s not as bad as it`s being painted, it certainly needs to be shored up.”
Black leaders aren`t any more encouraging. Moderates such as Mel Jordan, director of the South Side office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People`s (NAACP) says, ”Historically, the relationship has been parental. But Jews have become less traditional, and so have blacks. We now demand a peer-group relationship.”
More to the point is black hard-liner Conrad Worrill, a professor of inner city studies at Northeastern Illinois University and chairman of the National Black United Front. ”The only reason the issue of black-Jewish relations surfaces is the Holocaust. This is the propaganda (designed) to show that Jewish people have been oppressed and are therefore more closely allied with blacks,” Worrill says. ”But in reality blacks are in a subservient relationship with Jews. For the black masses, it`s been an exploitative situation.”
To this Jewish leaders reply that it was simply a case of blacks as an economic underclass typically suffering from ghetto merchants and landlords and that at one point in time, these merchants and landlords happened to be Jewish because blacks moved into poor Jewish neighborhoods. Both blacks and Jews admit that the same kind of problems with merchants and landlords persist even after Jews have moved out and been replaced by Lebanese, Korean and Vietnamese counterparts.
Nonetheless, Jews are still being blamed for the blacks` problems. ”The Jews should never have sold those stores to Arabs,” says the NAACP`s Jordan. ”There should have been a concerted effort to sell them to the black community.” By this reckoning, Jews feel, they can`t win with blacks–damned for being in the ghetto, and damned for leaving. Hence Rabbi Lincoln`s statement: ”Blacks blame us for all their problems, regardless.”
”One disconcerting trend is the black ideological identification with the Third World,” explains Michael Kotzin, Midwest director of the Anti-Defamation League. ”Blacks with that identification tend to be anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. That`s why they accept the false propaganda that Israel is especially linked with South Africa.” Kotzin adds that part of the problem
”is a lack of memory that Jewish people were close to the black community during the civil rights movement.”
Moreover, a number of studies have indicated that blacks are becoming institutionally anti-Semitic not on the basis of actual experience but of intellectual orientation. Kotzin cites a Harris poll released in 1978 by the National Conference of Christians and Jews ”that indicated that unlike anti- Semitism in whites, which generally diminishes with higher educational levels, the younger and more educated the black person, the more likely he is to hold anti-Jewish sentiments. What`s more, black leaders are more anti- Semitic than blacks in general.
”The Harris survey in question,” says Kotzen, ”interviewed non-Jewish whites, blacks generally and black leaders and sought their reactions to several statements including this one: `When it comes to choosing between people and money, Jews will choose money.` Among white gentiles, 32 percent agreed. For blacks in general, 56 percent agreed. But for black leaders, 81 percent agreed.”
The bottom line, says Mordechai Simon, executive director of the Chicago Board of Rabbis, is that ”Jews are saying, `We reached out to the black community, worked hard for and with them, and after all that, it didn`t work out.` ”
As the black-Jewish relationship was souring, a separate relationship was independently emerging between Jews and Hispanics. In the late `70s Jews, along with the rest of the world, discovered that Hispanics were America`s fastest growing minority. It began ”when Jewish organizations realized that the five or six cities with the largest Jewish populations also had the largest Hispanic populations,” says David Roth of the American Jewish Committee`s (AJC) Institute of American Pluralism. ”We`re talking New York, south Florida, southern California, Chicago and Philadelphia. So, clearly, we needed bridges to these people.”
But the real impetus for the AJC to join hands with Hispanics arose out of a sense of Jewish history. Roth remembers a day in 1980 when committee staffers debated their national program in New York. ”My colleagues and I were suggesting a fair and generous immigration policy,” recalls Roth. ”But senior members wanted to talk about keeping illegals out. Then Irving M. Levine (head of the Institute of American Pluralism) began to tap into Jewish historic consciousness, talking about what didn`t happen in the `30s–closed immigration–and what did happen in the `40s–the Holocaust–because America wasn`t willing to take Jews.
”In no time at all,” Roth continues, ”the members who were talking about illegal immigration and restrictive immigration policy were now thinking about a fair and generous immigration policy. Their Jewish conscience had been tapped.”
The 1980 American Jewish Committee conference in New York and countless other meetings throughout the Jewish community slowly developed a dual motive for Jewish relations with Hispanics. The first is the Jewish compulsion for social justice. The second is the Jewish compulsion to make alliances.
The pioneer in Chicago`s Jewish-Hispanic relationship, Rabbi Robert Marx of the Jewish Council for Urban Affairs, explains why his group has been working in the Pilsen and Humboldt Park areas since 1973. ”Jews have a destiny to work for social justice,” says Marx, ”and the Hispanics are a very worthy people. Some people will dismiss (our efforts) as do-goodism, but it`s really a religious thing. It`s an expression of my Judaism.”
Marx admits that within his altruism is an element of self-interest.
”When tensions are reduced in the community,” he says, ”when there aren`t great gaps between rich and poor, Jews benefit. Jews thrive best in a fair society.”
David Roth also stresses social justice but adds, ”Historically, we`re afraid of being alone and isolated. We know how bad that was in Europe. In a democratic society the name of the game is to build the best coalition. There`s always a (Jewish) desire to find new groups with whom to ally.”
Most leaders involved in building the Jewish-Hispanic coalition carefully point out that the alliance is not a substitute for the deteriorating black-Jewish relations. Gary Rubin, a deputy director of the American Jewish Committee in New York, agrees: ”I have heard of some Jewish leaders saying that relations with blacks are difficult now and that therefore we`ll turn to Hispanics. But that won`t work, and it isn`t working like that. Indeed, we expect no short-term advantage at all. Jews and Hispanics simply seek justice and coalition–and one doesn`t come without the other.”
The reality, says Michael Kotzin of the ADL, is that ”Jews would have been looking for the relationship with Hispanics no matter what happened with blacks. That may be true. On the other hand, David Roth says, ”The increased awareness of the Hispanic dialogue was boosted by our feelings about the problematic relationship with blacks.”
Sources differ on just when Jewish leaders became sufficiently alarmed by black anti-Semitism to seek out the Hispanic alliance. Jonathan Levine, Chicago director of the American Jewish Committee says, ”It was just after the Andrew Young affair (when Young as U.S. ambassador to the UN met with PLO officials) that we began hearing over and over again that Jews should now reach out to Hispanics.” Rabbi Arnold Kaimon of Congregation Kol Ami, active in Hispanic-Jewish activities, cites ”the Farrakhan matter as the turning point.”
Rabbi Simon adds: ”It`s not that the Jews felt betrayed by blacks and therefore suddenly sought out Hispanics. But when we offered our hand and it was slapped down, we became aware that there was another group that we had been ignoring and needed help.” Right now Jews are in fact working with several minorities, including Asians and Haitians. But Hispanics have drawn increasing Jewish interest ”because Jews have recognized the growth of their size and significance in the community,” says Kotzin.
So while it is true that black-Jewish and Hispanic-Jewish relationships are evolving independently of each other, it is also true, and strikingly so, that while Jews and blacks are drifting apart, Hispanics and Jews are coming closer together.
Just as Jews and Hispanics in other cities have found their own unique common ground, in Chicago no Jewish-Hispanic social action wouldhave come about without the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs and its co-founders, Rabbi Robert Marx and Lew Kreinberg. In 1973, when the 18th Street Development Corporation was unknown, unfinanced and unable to tap into social action programs, Marx and Kreinberg ”came in and helped us get our act together,”
recalls Richard DeVries, 18th Street`s training project manager. ”It wasn`t that JCUA did it. They helped us do it ourselves by providing the technical assistance. JCUA taught us where and how to apply for federal and foundation funds, how to generate publicity, how to mobilize the community even if it means going door to door, how to prioritize our resources–just everything we needed.”
In 10 years 18th Street has acquired seven slum properties and trained 250 minority apprentices, most of them Latino. When its latest building project is completed, 18th Street will have renovated 30 apartments for rent to neighborhood people. The program has been immensely popular in Pilsen. Once occupied, residents cherish their attractive new residences; in 10 years only two vacancies have occurred.
DeVries asserts that Hispanic leaders immediately perceived JCUA as a
”laid-back organization on a pretty altruistic one-way street, not expecting any payback. They don`t say, `We will control.` Instead they facilitate and promote local leadership, teach us to determine what our own agenda is and then to pursue it ourselves. It takes a while to really figure out that they`re even Jewish because they never promote it.” Rabbi Marx remarks that JCUA`s approach is ”based on the Maimonidian principle that the highest form of charity is to help someone help himself.”
But if Marx`s inspiration is religious, Kreinberg`s is strictly social politics. An old-fashioned Jewish liberal, Kreinberg is wedded to the struggle for the underdog. Generally dressed in drooping jeans and a lumberman`s shirt, Kreinberg has impressed Hispanic leaders as ”a concerned Jew who clearly has decided what kind of world he wants to live in,” as DeVries describes him. Terri Medina, 18th Street`s housing coordinator, swears by Kreinberg, calling him ”marvelous, a guy who has given totally of himself to help the Hispanic community and has never asked one thing in return.”
Kreinberg carries around an enormous wealth of neighborhood history and likes to recall the political injustices of the `50s and `60s–the era he is emotionally locked into. ”Our (inner city) work is a statement that Jews aren`t interested just in themselves but in the city at large,” he insists.
”The only thing we can expect in return is a healthier city in which to live.”
