All through the Fifties and Sixties, as I grew up in Fair Lawn, my beloved hometown in northern Latest Jersey, almost every considered one of our immediate neighbors, the handfuls of families around our block and people nearby, was, like us, Jewish.
Over here, likewise housed in split-level colonials on quarter-acre plots, lived the Fishmans, the Kutners and the Broslovksys, over there the Nichterns, the Goldenbergs and the Hefflers, and across the corner, the Krakauers, Laskers, Witzburgs, Hamburgs, Solomons, Roselinskys, Klappers, Cohens, Hermans and Heymanns.
But due to my natural naivete as a boy, as I lived on this suburb in Bergen County, about 12 miles west of Latest York City, from 1954 to 1975, I never knew the reality about our adjoining neighborhood.
Only a block away from us, in a bit of Fair Lawn called Radburn — an internationally renowned 149-acre enclave later designated a National Historic Landmark District for its revolutionary infrastructure — our kind were unwelcome.
Radburn — originally about two-thirds Protestant and about one-third Catholic — had systematically excluded Jews from owning homes from the Nineteen Thirties to the Fifties.
This disparity felt all of the more disturbing to me years later because I not only lived 200 yards from Radburn, but additionally lived on Radburn Road, attended Radburn Elementary School, played in Radburn parks and playgrounds and my father managed the Radburn Plaza Constructing, a landmark business property. So without actually living in Radburn, I used to be nonetheless very much Radburn.
This month Fair Lawn’s one hundredth anniversary ends, doing so against the backdrop of an unprecedented worldwide surge in antisemitism since Hamas attacked Israel over a yr ago.
Over the past yr, Fair Lawn has rolled out a street fair, a float for the Memorial Day parade and an oral history project. But as its one hundredth anniversary involves a detailed, Fair Lawn has yet to acknowledge how its cherished Radburn section got here under the shadow of systemic antisemitism.
“We had no Jewish people living in houses in Radburn up through the Sixties,” says Cornell Christianson, a former Radburn resident and co-author of “Legendary Locals Of Fair Lawn,” a town history. “None of the youngsters in my Boy Scout troop was Jewish either.”
In a couple of case, Radburn residents resorted to sabotaging a Jewish couple enthusiastic about buying a house there in 1950. “The word within the neighborhood got out that a Jew and his family — my mother and father — were about to purchase a house in Radburn,” says former Radburn resident Janet Moss Kass.
“Several of the families surrounding the home pooled some money, approached the vendor and offered to purchase the home out from under my parents in an effort to ‘stop Jews from moving into Radburn.’ But the vendor refused, and we moved in, becoming only the second or third Jewish family there.”
One other, similar incident within the Fifties proved equally telling. “My mother told me that when she and my father originally looked in Radburn for a house to purchase, the actual estate broker, himself Jewish, said they might be ‘unhappy’ there,” a current Jewish Radburn resident who requested anonymity recalls.
“On the time, my parents had no idea what he meant, nor why he said it. So that they followed his advice to purchase a house lower than 50 yards away from Radburn. They’d never handled any prejudice — they all the time lived amongst other Jews in The Bronx — and so that they never suspected any. But years later they realized that they were being deliberately excluded.”
Similarly, in March, 1953, the Schoenberg family — mother, father and two sons — moved into Radburn, among the many first Jewish families then to live there. In response, six of the 16 houses on the cul-de-sac went up on the market inside weeks, evidently because this Jewish family had bought a house down the block.
“No person knew what a Jew looked like or how we were going to act,” recalls Steve Schoenberg, then only age 3. “Were we going to smash the neighborhood? Drive property value down? I assume people had no idea what to anticipate.”
Some Jewish Radburn residents today recall feeling ostracized as children within the Fifties. “A woman on our block had a celebration and invited all her classmates except me,” says one.
Says one other, “Some kids called me ‘k–e’ and ‘dirty Jew’ as I walked to highschool. Finally, I gave those kids bloody noses they usually learned some respect.”
Such anecdotes reinforce the fact that Radburn was a microcosm of the national landscape, says Hasia R. Diner, creator of “The Jews of the US, 1654 to 2000” and director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History.
“What happened in Radburn was pretty common in suburbs across the country,” Diner says. “Developers were free to discriminate, but only up until about 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that the restrictive covenants in place were unenforceable.”
Radburn’s original planner, Clarence Stein, though himself Jewish, got down to limit the variety of Jews there. He envisioned Radburn as non-Jewish, but mainly because real estate interests feared that if it became ‘too Jewish,’ it might attract still more Jews and non-Jews would stay away.”
No written policy expressly banning Jews from living in Radburn ever appears to have existed. But historians and residents have identified an implicit, unspoken understanding amongst real estate investors that Radburn can be “restricted,” and, further, that realtors would typically inform Jewish families searching for housing there that they is perhaps “more comfortable” living elsewhere on the town.
“Restrictive covenants for segregated housing were fairly widely used after World War I in suburban America to maintain out Jews and others,” says Scott Richman, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League for Latest York and Latest Jersey. “That orchestrating of the population — each popular and pernicious — truly ended only in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act.”
Even the web site for the Radburn Association itself acknowledges this history of segregated housing. “For no less than its first twenty years, Radburn systematically excluded as residents virtually all people of color and virtually all Jews,” it says.
“We very clearly have to just accept our past,” says Ronald S. Roth, rabbi emeritus on the B’nai Sholom/Fair Lawn Jewish Center. “We should always be unafraid to show what happened here, and in addition to have fun that the barriers to us were eventually broken down.”
“Discrimination against Jews in Radburn early on within the twentieth century is well-documented,” adds Fair Lawn Mayor Gail Rottenstrich. “Radburn clearly prohibited the sale of homes to Jews for many years. Our town’s one hundredth anniversary celebration should [have] acknowledged as much. I can be in favor of telling our whole history.”
Attitudes about Jews nationwide post-World War II shifted toward acceptance. Laws against discrimination in housing were enacted and enforced. And, because the country went, so went Radburn. Eventually its Catholic population expanded and the variety of Protestants dwindled.
I might have liked to see my hometown make some gesture toward solemn remembrance over the past yr, especially because the post-Oct. seventh antisemitic tide continues unabated.
But this didn’t occur. Back in October, Fair Lawn’s one hundredth anniversary committee discussed acknowledging the problem, but decided against doing so.
Ah, but here’s a glad twist of irony. Soon after World War II, Fair Lawn embraced Jews and evolved right into a Jewish stronghold. The town’s population of about 35,000 has remained an estimated 30% to 40% Jewish for no less than half a century now, says Rabbi Roth. Nine of its 21 houses of worship are synagogues.
An incident from Fair Lawn HS’s fiftieth reunion for its 1958 graduating class in 2008 suggests that the injuries inflicted many years ago are slowly healing.
Last yr Janet Moss Kass reached out to her older brother Lawrence Moss, who told her what happened at that fiftieth anniversary event.
A lady unfamiliar to Moss approached him and introduced herself as Ruth Cheney. She said she was glad to see him there because for a few years she had carried a burden and needed to apologize.
“For what?” Moss asked.
Cheney then admitted that her own parents were among the many neighbors who conspired to purchase the home the Moss family planned to purchase in 1950 to forestall a Jewish family from moving into Radburn. Cheney recounted overhearing as a 10-year-old the conversations at meetings where her parents and neighbors asked, “What are we going to do?” before resolving to chip in on the $16,000 purchase.
“I all the time felt it was flawed,” Cheney said. In apologizing, she sought to make amends for a flawed committed by her parents greater than 50 years earlier.
“I forgive you,” Moss said without hesitation. “And I forgive your parents, too.”
If only Fair Lawn itself had also seized this anniversary to issue some semblance of an apology.
Bob Brody is the creator of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
All through the Fifties and Sixties, as I grew up in Fair Lawn, my beloved hometown in northern Latest Jersey, almost every considered one of our immediate neighbors, the handfuls of families around our block and people nearby, was, like us, Jewish.
Over here, likewise housed in split-level colonials on quarter-acre plots, lived the Fishmans, the Kutners and the Broslovksys, over there the Nichterns, the Goldenbergs and the Hefflers, and across the corner, the Krakauers, Laskers, Witzburgs, Hamburgs, Solomons, Roselinskys, Klappers, Cohens, Hermans and Heymanns.
But due to my natural naivete as a boy, as I lived on this suburb in Bergen County, about 12 miles west of Latest York City, from 1954 to 1975, I never knew the reality about our adjoining neighborhood.
Only a block away from us, in a bit of Fair Lawn called Radburn — an internationally renowned 149-acre enclave later designated a National Historic Landmark District for its revolutionary infrastructure — our kind were unwelcome.
Radburn — originally about two-thirds Protestant and about one-third Catholic — had systematically excluded Jews from owning homes from the Nineteen Thirties to the Fifties.
This disparity felt all of the more disturbing to me years later because I not only lived 200 yards from Radburn, but additionally lived on Radburn Road, attended Radburn Elementary School, played in Radburn parks and playgrounds and my father managed the Radburn Plaza Constructing, a landmark business property. So without actually living in Radburn, I used to be nonetheless very much Radburn.
This month Fair Lawn’s one hundredth anniversary ends, doing so against the backdrop of an unprecedented worldwide surge in antisemitism since Hamas attacked Israel over a yr ago.
Over the past yr, Fair Lawn has rolled out a street fair, a float for the Memorial Day parade and an oral history project. But as its one hundredth anniversary involves a detailed, Fair Lawn has yet to acknowledge how its cherished Radburn section got here under the shadow of systemic antisemitism.
“We had no Jewish people living in houses in Radburn up through the Sixties,” says Cornell Christianson, a former Radburn resident and co-author of “Legendary Locals Of Fair Lawn,” a town history. “None of the youngsters in my Boy Scout troop was Jewish either.”
In a couple of case, Radburn residents resorted to sabotaging a Jewish couple enthusiastic about buying a house there in 1950. “The word within the neighborhood got out that a Jew and his family — my mother and father — were about to purchase a house in Radburn,” says former Radburn resident Janet Moss Kass.
“Several of the families surrounding the home pooled some money, approached the vendor and offered to purchase the home out from under my parents in an effort to ‘stop Jews from moving into Radburn.’ But the vendor refused, and we moved in, becoming only the second or third Jewish family there.”
One other, similar incident within the Fifties proved equally telling. “My mother told me that when she and my father originally looked in Radburn for a house to purchase, the actual estate broker, himself Jewish, said they might be ‘unhappy’ there,” a current Jewish Radburn resident who requested anonymity recalls.
“On the time, my parents had no idea what he meant, nor why he said it. So that they followed his advice to purchase a house lower than 50 yards away from Radburn. They’d never handled any prejudice — they all the time lived amongst other Jews in The Bronx — and so that they never suspected any. But years later they realized that they were being deliberately excluded.”
Similarly, in March, 1953, the Schoenberg family — mother, father and two sons — moved into Radburn, among the many first Jewish families then to live there. In response, six of the 16 houses on the cul-de-sac went up on the market inside weeks, evidently because this Jewish family had bought a house down the block.
“No person knew what a Jew looked like or how we were going to act,” recalls Steve Schoenberg, then only age 3. “Were we going to smash the neighborhood? Drive property value down? I assume people had no idea what to anticipate.”
Some Jewish Radburn residents today recall feeling ostracized as children within the Fifties. “A woman on our block had a celebration and invited all her classmates except me,” says one.
Says one other, “Some kids called me ‘k–e’ and ‘dirty Jew’ as I walked to highschool. Finally, I gave those kids bloody noses they usually learned some respect.”
Such anecdotes reinforce the fact that Radburn was a microcosm of the national landscape, says Hasia R. Diner, creator of “The Jews of the US, 1654 to 2000” and director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History.
“What happened in Radburn was pretty common in suburbs across the country,” Diner says. “Developers were free to discriminate, but only up until about 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that the restrictive covenants in place were unenforceable.”
Radburn’s original planner, Clarence Stein, though himself Jewish, got down to limit the variety of Jews there. He envisioned Radburn as non-Jewish, but mainly because real estate interests feared that if it became ‘too Jewish,’ it might attract still more Jews and non-Jews would stay away.”
No written policy expressly banning Jews from living in Radburn ever appears to have existed. But historians and residents have identified an implicit, unspoken understanding amongst real estate investors that Radburn can be “restricted,” and, further, that realtors would typically inform Jewish families searching for housing there that they is perhaps “more comfortable” living elsewhere on the town.
“Restrictive covenants for segregated housing were fairly widely used after World War I in suburban America to maintain out Jews and others,” says Scott Richman, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League for Latest York and Latest Jersey. “That orchestrating of the population — each popular and pernicious — truly ended only in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act.”
Even the web site for the Radburn Association itself acknowledges this history of segregated housing. “For no less than its first twenty years, Radburn systematically excluded as residents virtually all people of color and virtually all Jews,” it says.
“We very clearly have to just accept our past,” says Ronald S. Roth, rabbi emeritus on the B’nai Sholom/Fair Lawn Jewish Center. “We should always be unafraid to show what happened here, and in addition to have fun that the barriers to us were eventually broken down.”
“Discrimination against Jews in Radburn early on within the twentieth century is well-documented,” adds Fair Lawn Mayor Gail Rottenstrich. “Radburn clearly prohibited the sale of homes to Jews for many years. Our town’s one hundredth anniversary celebration should [have] acknowledged as much. I can be in favor of telling our whole history.”
Attitudes about Jews nationwide post-World War II shifted toward acceptance. Laws against discrimination in housing were enacted and enforced. And, because the country went, so went Radburn. Eventually its Catholic population expanded and the variety of Protestants dwindled.
I might have liked to see my hometown make some gesture toward solemn remembrance over the past yr, especially because the post-Oct. seventh antisemitic tide continues unabated.
But this didn’t occur. Back in October, Fair Lawn’s one hundredth anniversary committee discussed acknowledging the problem, but decided against doing so.
Ah, but here’s a glad twist of irony. Soon after World War II, Fair Lawn embraced Jews and evolved right into a Jewish stronghold. The town’s population of about 35,000 has remained an estimated 30% to 40% Jewish for no less than half a century now, says Rabbi Roth. Nine of its 21 houses of worship are synagogues.
An incident from Fair Lawn HS’s fiftieth reunion for its 1958 graduating class in 2008 suggests that the injuries inflicted many years ago are slowly healing.
Last yr Janet Moss Kass reached out to her older brother Lawrence Moss, who told her what happened at that fiftieth anniversary event.
A lady unfamiliar to Moss approached him and introduced herself as Ruth Cheney. She said she was glad to see him there because for a few years she had carried a burden and needed to apologize.
“For what?” Moss asked.
Cheney then admitted that her own parents were among the many neighbors who conspired to purchase the home the Moss family planned to purchase in 1950 to forestall a Jewish family from moving into Radburn. Cheney recounted overhearing as a 10-year-old the conversations at meetings where her parents and neighbors asked, “What are we going to do?” before resolving to chip in on the $16,000 purchase.
“I all the time felt it was flawed,” Cheney said. In apologizing, she sought to make amends for a flawed committed by her parents greater than 50 years earlier.
“I forgive you,” Moss said without hesitation. “And I forgive your parents, too.”
If only Fair Lawn itself had also seized this anniversary to issue some semblance of an apology.
Bob Brody is the creator of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
