Close to Home: Suburbanization, Residential Segregation, and Jewish-Black Relations in St. Louis Park and North Minneapolis, MN

This paper argues that postwar Minneapolis Jews relocated to suburbs such as St. Louis Park in part as a response to the continuing movement of blacks forced by a segregated housing market into the Jewish enclave of North Minneapolis. Jewish leaders, conscious of their community’s prewar experience with antisemitism, responded by adopting a liberal view on housing issues. This view emphasized the role of individuals over institutions in the creation of segregation and aided leaders as they facilitated their population’s acceptance into the suburbs and downplayed charges of Jewish racism and exploitation. The liberalism of Jewish leaders clashed with North Minneapolis blacks’ experience of the ghettoization, or “racial transition, resegregation, and economic decline,\u27\u27 resulting from the interrelated phenomena of housing discrimination, white flight, and urban renewal, and the growing gap between these viewpoints led to a repeated series of conflicts between blacks and Jews during the late 1960s. Postwar liberalism incentivized both groups to view conflicts around residential segregation through a culturalist lense and eventually forced them to regard each other as the chief threats to each other\u27s status and security. Because of this, leaders of these groups did not examine the structural factors that shaped the housing market both groups operated in