Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Gordon, Ina, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Summarized by Kathryn Amend

Ina Gordon grew up on Morris Avenue, just east of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. She describes her childhood with two siblings in a tiny apartment, and her happy upbringing despite her family’s economic struggles. She reminisces on summers spent renting bungalows in the Catskills and childhood joys such as roller skating, visiting the library, and playing tennis.

Gordon explains the importance of education in her family, and describes how she ended up traveling to the University of Chicago for her undergraduate degree. She and her brother both received scholarships to attend. They had a …

Gurock, Jeffrey, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Jeffrey Gurock’s parents, his father, originally from Harlem and his mother from Brooklyn, were among the first people to move into Parkchester when it opened. His father was a firefighter and his mother was a bookkeeper. Gurock was born in 1949 and lived in Parkchester until he married in 1974. After living briefly in Cincinnati, Ohio, he returned to the Bronx and has been living in Riverdale ever since.

Gurock remembers Parkchester as predominantly Irish Catholic with many Italian and Jewish children. No Hispanics or African Americans were allowed to move in until 1968. While he recognizes this segregation now, …

Hochberg, Herbert, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Herbert Hochberg, born in 1930, spent the first 10 years of his life in economic hardship because of the Great Depression. Both his parents migrated from Western Ukraine and lived in the Bronx since their marriage in 1928. They took in an infant to make end’s meet, and after the war his father went into the business of building two-family homes in the Bronx, while his mother stayed at home. Hochberg grew up across from Bronx Park until 1939 when his family moved to the newly developed Northeast Bronx near Allerton Avenue and Pelham Parkway. He describes the area as …

Brock, Joan, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Joan Brock, born 1943, grew up on Bryant Avenue between 173 and 174 Streets in the Bronx. The East Bronx was considered poorer than the West Bronx, split by the Grand Concourse. Both of her parents were born and raised in New York, and they met while they were both working in a tea factory. Her father would get into the business of selling vending machines until Brock was 13 and he bought a hardware store. Her mother never worked after marrying except to help her husband with the store.

Brock describes the neighborhood as predominantly Jewish and Italian, though …

Salinger, Marianne, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Marianne Salinger was born in Berlin, Germany in 1923 and moved to New York with her family when she was 15. Fleeing from the Nazis, her family first moved to England, then to Philadelphia, and then to Kew Gardens in Queens, New York. Salinger lived in Kew Gardens for the largest portion of her life. She remembers how initially, Kew Gardens was filled with immigrants, primarily Jewish immigrants, but became more Hispanic and Russian over time. She moved to the Bronx in 2016.

Salinger did not know that she was Jewish until she was nine years old and considered herself …

Hochberg, Marc, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Marc Hochberg was born 1949. He grew up with parents, both the children of immigrants, in a six story apartment building on Holland Avenue, off the south side of Pelham Parkway. The area is remembered as 90% Jewish, with one Italian friend from elementary school. He attended Castle Hill Junior High School in Parkchester, which still had few non-white students at the time, and the Bronx High School of Science. When he was in high school his parents moved to Grand Concourse and 165th Street. Bronx Science is remembered as a top education, and he would go to Franklin and …

Several, Ruth, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Ruth Several was born in 1951 and grew up living on the Grand Concourse, where her parents were living at the time. Her father worked at the Concourse Center of Israel, an orthodox synagogue on the Grand Concourse. They lived in a large apartment in an art deco style building. She remembers 95% of the building as Jewish, not including the non-Jewish superintendent. The neighborhood had many mom and pop stores, no chain stores, and many synagogues. Several attend a Jewish Day School in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so her mother was a bookkeeper nearby who would take …

Katz, Gloria, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Gloria Katz’s family immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, moving up from the Lower East Side to the Bronx on Park Avenue. She describes her many relatives coming to New York and making lives for themselves, including her parents meeting on a singles cruise around Manhattan for young immigrants and getting married. Her older brother was born in 1934, and was a rebellious and hyperactive child, getting kicked out of yeshiva and sent to public school. Katz was born in September 1944. She explains that because her father did not have stable employment in the fur industry during …

Yelloz, Eva, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Eva Yelloz was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany and came to the Bronx in 1949 with her parents. They lived in the Melrose neighborhood in the Bronx, on Avenue St. John. Her mother was 19 when World War Two began, working as an apprentice in a non-Jewish home, and she heard her family was in the Warsaw ghetto. Her father had been killed and the family was sent to Treblinka, but she jumped off the train, escaping and being nursed back to life by a non-Jewish family before becoming a partisan for the remainder of the war. …

Marietta J. Tanner, Mark Naison

Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP)

Interviewee: Marietta J. Tanner

Interviewers: Mark Naison, Donna Joseph, Saudah Muhammad

Date: July 2020

Summarized by Sophia Maier

Marietta J. Tanner was born in 1928 in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Influenced by the activism of her father and the wartime experiences of her uncle, Marietta is a life-long political activist. Her parents explained to her from a young age their experiences in Jim Crow era Pennsylvania and by the age of six she was passing out political pamphlets and registering people to vote with the rest of her family. After attending a segregated school in her youth and a brief period …

Newman, Ellen, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Ellen Newman was born in 1953 in Bronx Hospital. Both sets of grandparents had immigrated to New York City as young children and her parents were both raised in the Bronx. She attended PS 114, by Yankee Stadium, Macombs Junior High School, Taft High School, and Lehman College for both her bachelor’s and master’s. Her family would go to upstate New York in the summers, and her father was an accountant and her mother was a bookkeeper. Newman lived in the Highbridge neighborhood of the Bronx until her family moved to Scott Towers, a Mitchell Lama Co-op. The Highbridge neighborhood …

Study Guide For Scenery, José Felipe Alvergue

Discussion Questions & Study Guides

Discussion topics, questions, and an outline for classroom use.

Everette Brown, Jacqueline, Mark Naison

Oral Histories

Interviewees: Jacqueline Everette Brown

Interviewers: Mark Naison

Date: August 2020

Summarized by Trystan Edwards

Jacqueline Everette Brown was born in the Bedstuy community of Brooklyn, New York. She fondly recollects her childhood as one of three girls in her family. Her mother and father migrated to New York from Georgia during the great migration in the late thirties. Brown and her family moved back to Georgia in the early 1950’s. It is during this time that she faced more overt racism, evidenced by her having to ride in the back of the bus. Nevertheless, Brown and her family quickly adjusted. …

Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments For An Ill-Used Past [Table Of Contents], Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O'Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, Nina Rowe

History

Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist reader and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of twenty-two essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in our news, our politics, and our propaganda; and in subtler ways that inform how we think about our histories, our countries, and ourselves. Each author looks to a history that has refused to remain past and uses the tools of the academy to read and re-read familiar …

Pre-Occupied Spaces: Remapping Italy's Transnational Migrations And Colonial Legacies [Table Of Contents], Teresa Fiore

Sociology

By linking Italy’s long history of emigration to all continents in the world, contemporary transnational migrations directed toward it, as well as the country’s colonial legacies, Fiore’s book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. Through an interdisciplinary cultural approach, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may hold interesting lessons about inclusiveness for the present.

Fiore rethinks Italy’s formation and development on a transnational map through cultural analysis of travel, living, and work spaces as depicted in literary, filmic, and musical texts. By demonstrating …

Smith, Candace, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Candace Smith was born and raised in the Bronx. From what she recalls her family lived on the top story of a two family home in the Tremont neighborhood until moving to the Patterson Houses in 1957 when she was around age 8. The home in Tremont was in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and she does not recall there being any other black families in the neighborhood. On the other hand, when they moved to the Patterson Houses, she does not recall any white families in the neighborhood there. Both of her parents had also grown up in the Bronx, …

Carr, Sylvia, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Racial dynamics of the Bronx was the central theme of this interview. There was a consensus shared amongst each interviewee that the Bronx during their childhoods was a racially heterogeneous area. The area known as Fish Avenue were Sylvia Carr grew up was primarily composed of very well off blacks. However, the blacks who lived in this area were lighter skinned as each interviewee pointed out. Each participant acknowledged a certain light skinned v. dark skinned power dynamic. Indeed, some of those interviewed were able to “pass” and were often mistaken for white. In addition to the presence of blacks …

Nietzsche And Darwin, Babette Babich

Working Papers

Abstract

I argue against the popular view of Nietzsche as Darwinist and I concur with other Nietzsche scholars who have also noted that other authors worked in Nietzsche’s thinking in association with Darwin, not only Spencer and Malthus but also Roux and Haeckel among others which also for Nietzsche included Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche offers plain condemnation of Darwin’s views but he is also often associated with Darwin owing to Darwin’s racism and his own vision of rank-order. I conclude with an emphasis on style and Nietzsche’s reading of antiquity to highlight the distinction he sought to make …

David, Patricia, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewers: Mark Naison and Natasha Lightfoot

Interviewee: Patricia David

Summarized by Leigh Waterbury

Patricia David was born inBirmingham,Englandin 1959. Her parents were both born inDominicain the French West Indies and immigrated toEngland. After Patricia was born her father came alone to theUnited Statesand lived inQueens. He then became a superintendent of a building in theSouth Bronxand then Patricia and her siblings moved along with their mother into the ground floor apartment onTremont Avenue. Her mother basically took over superintendent duties so that her father could work to provide extra income. Many of the other apartments in the building were occupied …

Speller, Kathryn, Mark Naison

Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP)

Interviewer: Brian Purnell, Princess Okieme

Interviewee: Kathryn Speller

Date of Interview: September 23, 2006

Summarized by Leigh Waterbury, January 31, 2006

Kathryn Speller grew up in what was referred to as welfare island, and then moved to the Bronx in the 1950’s. While growing up in the city, she experienced the racial segregation that limited what areas she was allowed in. She described the racism she experienced in not being allowed in certain places or having to enter buildings through the servants entrances.

While looking to move into the Bronx, Kathryn experienced a lot of difficulty in finding apartments available …

Cunningham, James And Cunningham, Margaret, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewees: James and Margaret Cunningham

Interviewers: Mark Naison and Natasha Lightfoot

Date: January 9, 2006

Summarized by Leigh Waterbury

James Cunningham was born in the Bronx in 1918 and describes what life was like in his household and his neighborhood. His father was a light-skinned black man who was considered colored while in WWI, and later when he moved to New York City to work as a customs inspector he was able to pass as white, which likely helped him to acquire that position. James attended PS 23 elementary school in his neighborhood around 167^th street, where he was …

Brindle, Donna, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewers: Mark Naison and Natasha Lightfoot

Interviewee: Donna Brindle

Date: May 23, 2005

Summarized by Leigh Waterbury

Donna Brindle was born in 1953 in the Bronx and lived on Intervale Avenue until around the age of 11. Her parents initially moved to the Bronx because other friends of theirs were, and those socializations became an important part of Donna’s upbringing. Both of her parents were musicians, her father was a concert pianist and one of the founders of The Symphony of the New World in the 1950‘s. Her parents were also politically active. Her mother worked with NAACP as well …

Washington, Valerie, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Valerie Washington is a lifelong resident of the Bronx, whose parents were both born in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica. She grew up on Wells Avenue, then 1098 Simpson Street where her parents were the superintendents of the building. She says there were no other African-American families in the building, and this was common in the area for the superintendents to be African-American with mostly white Jewish tenants. She attended PS 20 where she was placed in the top classes from the very beginning of her education. She then attended Herman Ritter Junior High and then Washington Irving High School in 1953, …

Coolie, Derrick, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewee: Derrick Cooley

Interviewer: Dr. Mark Naison

Date of Interview August 27, 2003

Summarized by Christian Rivera

Derrick Cooley, a counselor, from the Butler houses ( E. 170^th Webster, South Bronx) grew up during the crack epidemic of the 1980’s. He experienced the interaction of drug dealers and drug addicts within the Butler house community. Furthermore, he witnessed the tragic effects of the urban drug culture through violence, rising high school dropout rates, and the influence of local Number Wholes.

The crack culture changed the priorities of the neighborhood youth. The youngsters were more interested in earning a dollar …