Disciplines

Jewish Studies

Abstract

Summarizer: Sophia Maier

Judy Flaxman’s family came to the Lower East Side from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. As they grew more affluent, they moved to the Bronx, where Flaxman was born in 1948. She lived on Walton Avenue near Tremont Avenue, which she describes as very Jewish with some Catholics. She attended PS 28, Wade Junior High School, and Bronx Science. She played many outdoor games with friends from her community and did after school activities at the YM/WHA, through which she attended a day camp during the summers.

Flaxman’s mother was a secretary and her father, after serving in WWII and running a candy store and luncheonette, went back to school on the GI Bill to become an educator. He was very involved in union organizing. The family would walk to visit her grandparents on Saturday mornings. Her mother was religious, and they attended a Young Israel nearby. Flaxman attended City College, where she met her husband and was involved in anti-Vietnam War protests. After college, she moved to the Midwest and earned a doctorate in psychology from Northwestern.

Flaxman taught at multiple universities and had a private practice. After she left home, her family moved to Co-op City because their building on Walton Avenue was in disrepair; her parents then moved to Israel in 1977. While Flaxman describes the Bronx in the 1970s as shocking, she believes there has been a renaissance in the Bronx since then. She has three sons, and she explains that there was less family connection and mutual support raising her family than when she was growing up. Flaxman differentiates between her children’s “ancestral homeland” of the Bronx and her experiences in Evanston, where there was still feelings of insecurity as a Jew.

Despite the poverty of her upbringing and that of her parents and grandparents, Flaxman shares many stories of their experiences in the Bronx. It was, to her, the center of the world. It was a bubble where she didn’t realize they were poor or that they were part of a minority religion; it was a time of rising expectations.

Keywords: Lower East Side, World War Two, Walton Avenue, Tremont Avenue, Grand Concourse, PS 28, Wade Junior High School, Bronx Science, City College, street games, YM/WHA, unions, education, antisemitism, Vietnam War, Chicago, Evanston, family, religion, Yiddish, psychology, Co-op City, landlord, Zionism, poverty, optimism

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