Reviews for Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and MetroWest

The average rating for Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and MetroWest based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-22 00:00:00 Joseph Zumbo I learned of Helmreich from his recent-ish obituaries, which all mentioned his _The New York Nobody Knows_. That book, of course, has spectacularly mixed reviews on this site---but it left me curious to see more of his life project. Unfortunately, _The Enduring Community_ doesn't live up to the standards of his later work---although his "popular history" is impeccably comprehensive, it reads too much like an overgrown Encyclopedia article rather than like either a sociological study or a personal reflection (his later books are somewhere between those). There are various glimmers of interesting detail, as revealed in his references to extensive interviews (detailed further in the chapter endnotes), but surprisingly little integration of those details into why they matter to people, rather than using them just to establish some timelines and interconnections. Given how much time he spends talking about fieldwork in other projects, I'm left wondering why. Maybe, as a scholar used to talking about his present, he just has trouble talking about the past? But even his last chapter, discussing the (then-)current MetroWest federation, he mostly catalogs statistics, rather than talking about who really is using the facilities.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-03 00:00:00 Marianne Karsh I guess I wanted something a bit more sociological, or more rigorous. Helmreich went to some archives and flipped through his Philip Roth collection, added some of his personal experience and wrote the kind of rambling and bittersweet version of the story that you might get if you worked in a Jewish old age home and were a very good listener. Actually, no, I think Helmreich should have done more of that himself, although there does seem to be flashes of oral history in his account and the occasional survey or statistical study does poke its nose in. I also had the feeling that after getting so much cooperation from the MetroWest organization he didn't want to be all that critical so his history does this thing: what ever happened in the past was ultimately for the good, because look how great everything is now! Which is not so terrible when you are writing about the centralization of charity organizations or changes in synagogue leadership but I get annoyed when he is writing about breaking unions that were too communist or about the fate of certain anti-Zionist personalities. Fortunately, the biggest thing in the history of Newark's Jews -- the Riot -- is handled well and Helmreich makes no bones about the fact that Jewish 'white flight' had already passed the tipping point in Newark before the riot. Still, I liked reading this book even if it was at times slow going and it is definitely useful if you plan to spend any amount of time with Jews in Essex County of a certain age, so you can hold your own when the baloney starts flying. Judging from some of the excerpts in here, maybe Philip Roth wouldn't be such a terrible novelist to read after all. I'll get to him when I finish with Amiri Baraka.