At a dinner party recently, I overheard the hostess, who is Jewish, having a conversation with her husband about the building on Fifth Avenue where they grew up. Our hostess pointed out that even though her husband’s parents were socially registered WASPS, they, like her family, had chosen to live in a building that was not “restricted”.
Does anyone remember what this once-common euphemism meant? Until at least the 1970s, and in some cases even beyond, Jews were prohibited from entering certain apartment buildings and hotels in New York.
Our hostess still has a map of Upper East Side co-ops that didn’t accept Jewish residents (or African Americans) in her mind. Another friend, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said she remembers a real estate agent trying to move her mother away from 775 Park Avenue and 19 East 72nd Street in 1976.n.d. cent
Don’t believe the propaganda. New York City, despite bagels, Yiddish, and urban legends about who runs this place, is not, and never has been, a Jewish town.
This buried truth was one of several subtexts in FX’s popular series “Feud: Capote vs. Swan,” which ended this week and recently resurfaced amid today’s rise in anti-Semitism across the city..
Jewish William S. Paley, founder of the megalithic CBS network, first married arts patron Dorothy Hart Hearst, then married Queen of the Capotes “Swan” Babe Cushing Mortimer as his trophy wife. They attempted to storm the barricades of the Gentiles by welcoming them as foreigners. ruling class.
It didn’t work. If anything, the Boston Brahmin Babe has gone down a notch, at least in the eyes of the old guard, who adheres to stricter codes than Manhattan’s Café Society. Paley set up St. Babe in a rented apartment at the Regis Hotel, then upgraded to his 20-room floor-through in a “restricted” limestone fortress at 820 Fifth Avenue.
But even when Paley was on the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, alongside the Rockefellers and Whitneys, many of the Rockefellers and Whitneys were involved, including the Bar Harbor Club in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and even the Bar Harbor Club in Maine. membership in the club was refused.
The intervention of his own brother-in-law, the dashing oil magnate John “Jock” Whitney, did not improve the situation.
The attitude toward Paley in these strongholds was evident when Jock’s sister, Joan Payson, warned the president of the team she owned, the Mets, to “watch out for Bill Paley.” He will take the gold out of your teeth in no time. ”
Contemporaries did not label Paley and his landowners as “white” as Jews do today. For example, the aristocrat Lady Diana Cooper called her media mogul friend an “Oriental” and a “Tartar”.
One of the lesser-known innovations of Capote’s famous 1966 “Black and White Ball,” the subject of the third episode of “The Feud,” was that the master of ceremonies It was a transcendental dissolution of barriers.
Anti-Semitism in New York is older than New York City itself. for 17 serious violations.th-Century Dutch law led Peter Stuyvesant to persecute Jewish settlers in the colony of New Amsterdam.
Edith Wharton, 19-year-old chroniclerth-An upper-class New York conventionalist wrote of the Jewish character, the financier Simon Rosedale, in The House of Delights (1905): He’s fat, shiny, and has a sloppy attitude. ”
The establishment’s hatred of Jews was not limited to immigrants seeking to infiltrate its ranks. In The American Scene (1907), Wharton’s friend Henry James compared the struggling Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side to insects.
When you slice them into pieces, each slimy piece “wiggles away contentedly…” he analogized. In it, the solid brilliance of Israel still remains. ” At least James, unlike today’s “from the river to the sea” exclusionists, recognized Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.
I have developed a thick skin over a lifetime of experiencing what today’s parlance would call “microaggressions.” I was never denied housing, but in my 20s I was advised not to write my maiden name (Fine) when signing in as a guest at a club that was off limits to me. (Yes, they still exist.) Jews are stereotyped as mean, homely, uncooperative, scheming, scheming, hell-bound, and worse. I’ve heard of it.
Although they sting, these thorns are different examples of anti-Semitism. They follow the “polite” and “gentleman’s agreement” types. A playbook that existed during the “Capote vs. Swan” era.
But after October 7, anti-Semitism in New York metastasized into something physically threatening, loudly proclaimed, and institutionally celebrated.
Right next to me on the Upper East Side, where my hostess friend and her husband grew up and where Bill and Babe Paley built their elegant mansions, our freedoms are threatened and our lives are in danger. are exposed to.
Outside Temple Emanuel, No. 65th Fifth, at the Henry Kissinger memorial service on Saturday morning in January, pro-Hamas gangs taunted Jewish worshipers, shouted insults at them, and blew smoke in their faces.
A few steps away from my apartment, another pro-Hamas mob surrounded a 43-year-old mother and her 17-year-old daughter carrying groceries, shouted “Nazi bitches” and threw things at their car.
Also near me is the Neue Galerie, founded by Ronald Lauder and filled with art returned from the Nazis, splattered with red paint spelling out the words “Ronald Slaughter.” Ta.
If New York were truly a Jewish city, these terrible hate crimes wouldn’t be rampant, and they wouldn’t go on with impunity.
Or, to borrow another popular phrase, after Hamas’ attack on Israel, there is no longer a “safe space” for Jews in New York.
Amy Fine Collins is a former Vanity Fair correspondent, editor at Air Mail, and most recently author of The International Best Dressed List: The Official Story (Rizzoli).
