Canarsie – The Jews & Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism - Hardcover

Rieder, J

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674093607 ISBN 13: 9780674093607

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1985

Synopsis

What accounts for the precarious state of liberalism in the mid 1980s? Why was the Republican Party able to steal away so many ethnic Democrats of modest means in recent presidential elections? Jonathan Rieder explores these questions in his powerful study of the Jews and Italians of Canarsie, a middle-income community that was once the scene of a wild insurgency against racial busing. Proud bootstrappers, the children of immigrants, Canarsians may speak with piquant New York accents, but their story has a more universal appeal. Canarsie is Middle America, Brooklyn-style.

About this title

Review

A sparkling shower of insights...Intellectually exciting. This is the best ethnography of a white community to appear in a decade, and should be read by every scholar in urban sociology, political sociology, and social movement...Rieder has crafted a finely detailed portrait. No scholarly book of recent memory better conveys the specific sense of outraged betrayal that swept through the urban precincts of the Democratic Party in the mid 1970s than does Jonathan Rieder's brilliant study "Canarsie," A remarkable compelling portrait of the new ways of middle America, drawn with compassion, grace, and wisdom.--Kai Erikson, President, American Sociological Association Yale anthropologist Jonathan Rieder spent two years living not in New Guinea or up the Amazon but in a place that his academic colleagues probably found even more exotic: the lower-middle-class neighborhood adjacent to New York's Kennedy Airport. There Rieder witnessed close-up the destruction of Roosevelt's coalition by voter revulsion against crime, welfare and casual disorder.--David Frum"Wall Street Journal" (03/28/2009)

Synopsis

A sociologist explores the recent disaffection with liberal values in a richly textured study of the political and social attitudes of Brooklyn Jews and Italians.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0674093607
• ISBN 13: 9780674093607
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328