By now most of my readers know that I grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s most of which time was before the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948.  In the mid-1940s the population of the Bronx was somewhere between 1.3-1.4 million people of which about 600,000 were Jewish which meant that this one borough of New York City was about 45% Jewish.

When I speak about that period, I often refer to it as having lived in an American “Shtetl” referring back to how the Jewish villages in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe were often characterized.

The difference was that in America Jews, for the most part, did not fear pogroms or violent antisemitism although, truth be told, there was sufficient negativism about Jews to go around even in the land of the free and the home of the brave of the 1940s and 50s.

We lived in a mixed Jewish and Irish-Catholic neighborhood and, as kids, were often beaten up by our Irish neighbors. But the good thing was that our public schools were 95% Jewish as the Catholic kids went to Catholic schools which were well located throughout the borough. ........

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