Disciplines

Jewish Studies

Abstract

Jack Jacobs’ parents, both born and raised in Poland, moved to the Bronx after surviving WWII and spending time in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. Jacobs was born in the 1950s in the Bronx, and grew up in the West Bronx, first on Creston Avenue near Burnside Avenue and then on Harrison Avenue near Tremont Avenue. He remembers living in the same building as other members of his extended family and the neighborhood being majority Jewish, particularly with many Holocaust survivors. This meant an intensely strong Jewish environment in terms of stores, education, and synagogues.

Following his mother’s socialist, secularist, background, Jacobs was enrolled in Yiddish school through the Workmen's Circle, Der Arbeter Ring, which would meet after the public school day had finished. There he learned to read and write Yiddish, before attending the Hebrew Institute of University Heights, an orthodox religious school. Education was very important in his household. His mother returned to school and would get a bachelor’s and master’s degree, eventually serving as a Supervising Social Worker for the Bronx Jewish Community Council in the East Bronx. His elementary school was overcrowded, but he got a high quality education and would attend Bronx High School of Science. Jacobs remembers Science being very strict, but also remembers how different things were during the 1967/1968 Teachers Strikes.

Jacobs’ parents would move to Co-op City as he went off to college at SUNY Binghamton. From there, he was a graduate student at Columbia and organized for a small Jewish socialist group. He cites his “socialist, secularist Yiddishist diaspora-oriented” background as influential in his future scholarly works and has overall positive memories of the Bronx, with a strong family and community to support him.

Keywords: Creston Avenue, Burnside Avenue, Harrison Avenue, Tremont Avenue, Co-op City, Poland, Vilna, Warsaw, Warsaw Ghetto, USSR, education, 1967/1968 Teachers Strike, socialist, Yiddish, protest, Bronx High School of Science, Columbia University, Workmen’s Circle, Borscht Belt

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