Customer Reviews

Jews of Weequahic (Images of America: New Jersey)

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If you were a resident of Newark, NJ residing in the Weequahic section of the city ~ this book is a MUST READ! And if you happen to be Jewish ~ it is definately REQUIRED READING. It is a truely accurate history of Jews living in the Weequahic section of Newark. Of course, if you attended the schools in that neighborhood you will further relate to the book. And if you are a Weequahic High School alumni... what are you waiting for? Buy the book!!!

Having grown up in that special neighborhood that was Weequahic in the forties and fifties, I highly recommend this to anyone wishing to sample the flavor of a neighborhood that continues to evoke memories by the dozens.

My kindergarten photograph of 1948, and Chancellor Avenue School graduation photo of 1956, were wonderful to see in print. I cherish the memories of those times, and encourage others to enjoy this book. The book will most definitely impart an understanding of what a vibrant, cohesive, and genuine community those of us who lived there were lucky to share.

"Jews of Weequahic" documents - in both text and photos - the heyday of the Jewish community of Newark, New Jersey. Covering the immediate pre- and post-war era and ending in 1967, this description of the life of a community centered in a given section of New Jersey's largest city is a deliciously nostalgic trip. Many such ethnic communities thrived in the post World War 2 boom period and then disappeared as a result of the upward social mobility of the professional and entrepeneurial classes among them, racism (which motivated them to move away from the "others" and kept the latter from adopting the suburban dream), the decay of urban life and the earliest stages of neoliberalism and de-industrialization (described in Philip Roth's "American Pastoral").

For those who lived in such communities, such as me, it was a wonderful and heartening trip. But while it warmed the heart, it provided little illumination for the head. What it lacks is the kind of economic and political analysis that might help those who didn't live in such places - and the sons, daughters and grandchildren of those who did - try to make sense of the shell of urban life that marks the remains of these places, in cities across the US.

I lived in Weequahic from my birth in 1949, until I went to college in the midwest in 1967 - two months after the riots ended Jewish life in that community. Living in a large Canadian city, Toronto, I still miss the life that this community offered and that is described in this photo essay.

Herman Rosenfeld, Toronto

I was a little disappointed in this book, in that I had hoped for more photographs of places, and less of people.