STUBBORN ATTACHMENTS.

Urban Exodus
Why the Jews Left Boston
and the Catholics Stayed
Gerald Gamm
Harvard University Press, $39.95, 396 pp.

Next September, twenty-five years after putting a face-usually an angry Irish face- on post-1960s backlash, Boston's busing era will officially draw to a close, interring once and for all the rancor and tribalism that marked this particularly American crucible. (Eerily, Judge W. Arthur Garrity, whose rulings brought forced integration to Boston, died just months after the vote to end busing.) Already a learned crowd of reporters, novelists, and scholars have deconstructed socioeconomic conflict in Boston-none better than the late J. Anthony Lukas, in Common Ground in 1985-to the point that the topic might seem as exhausted as battle-weary Bostonians themselves. But in Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed, Gerald Gamm says there are still holes in the story, most significantly in the divergent connections Catholics and Jews maintained with their religious institutions. Synagogues and parishes, Gamm contends, essentially dictated who stayed in Boston's neighborhoods, who left for the suburbs, when, and why.

It's an intriguing argument, one almost provocative in its simplicity- though not without a few holes of its own. Cultural differences, it's often been said, explain why city-dwelling Catholics tend to fight turf wars, while Jews lean toward flight. Gamm agrees, but sees different causes. Distinguishing himself from Jonathan Rieder, John T. McGreevy and other urban chroniclers, Gamm notes, "Jewish institutions could survive by moving out of a declining neighborhood...but Catholic institutions have been permanently tied to their original location." Catholics, Gamm adds, have "a different attachment to territory," not "a different capacity for racist behavior." Gamm also stresses that the much-discussed ethno-racial battles of the 1960s have their roots in the 1920s. Then "Jewish neighborhoods began their long unraveling, and...Catholic neighborhoods began their resistance," hence the reason migrating blacks moved almost exclusively onto formerly Jewish blocks following World War II. Maps of Boston's Roxbury and Dorchester districts vividly illustrate these demographic shifts, which, by the 1990s, reinvigorated parishes such as central Dorchester's Saint Peter's. Offered as a symbol of Catholic vitality and endurance, Saint Peter's celebrates Mass in three languages, and more than 80 percent of its grade school students are black or Hispanic. But, just as Saint Peter's is a neat snapshot of Gamm's thesis, it also presents wrinkles which Urban Exodus never quite irons out.

The book's subtitle contends that Boston Catholics stayed. But which Catholics? The church and clergy may have stayed, but most of the Irish who dominated Saint Peter's just two decades ago are gone. More broadly, Urban Exodus is a study not of "Boston," but of Roxbury and Dorchester. Pivotal surrounding areas, such as South Boston and Charlestown, are not discussed. And, while Gamm's intense localism is his book's strength- particularly the touching letters from parishioners he quotes-this also precludes consideration of the wider world. There is scant mention of the Great Depression, the World Wars, or even city politics. Gamm provides illuminating quotes on Catholic anti-Semitism from native Bostonians Theodore H. White and Nat Hentoff, yet fails to mention the rise and fall of Father Charles Coughlin. Religious tension in Boston was so high on the eve of World War II that (as Gamm notes) Wallace Stegner criticized the city's Catholic leadership in the Atlantic Monthly. (In New York at this time, frightening, if bizarre, coalitions developed between Catholic-dominated Christian Front groups, the German- American Bund, and even the anti-Catholic Klan.) Frustratingly, Gamm doesn't consider whether these developments also spurred middle-class Jewish flight.

At times it feels as if Urban Exodus could have been bulked up to incorporate a broader analysis, or slimmed down into an excellent journal article or two. McGreevy's Parish Boundaries still seems to provide fuller insights into religious (and racial and class) tensions, not just for the whole of urban America but also for Boston. As McGreevy has noted, the civil rights battle between liberal clergy and conservative parishioners (and clergy) was particularly intense in Boston, a development Gamm only touches on. He takes a brief look at the Association of Boston Urban Priests, and describes meetings "at which priests attempted to teach racial tolerance and urged whites to stay." Surely some listened, but others as easily decided they were more white than Catholic, and had no qualms severing ties to priests who (as they saw it) preached racial politics from the pulpit. This, at least in part, may explain the post-1960s drain of whites from central Dorchester parishes. Yet, even in recent decades, as Gamm intriguingly notes, blocks nearest churches have remained white and Catholic as the rest of the parish changed. But the Catholics who fled seem at least as revealing a story as those who stayed. Perhaps what could ultimately be said is that some Boston Catholics stayed longer, particularly in areas like east Dorchester, which remains not only white, but also (perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not) most remote from black neighborhoods.

Gamm, an associate professor of political science and history at the University of Rochester, does consider broader factors-the automobile, for one-in his valuable look back at suburbanization in the 1920s. Three decades later, Gamm writes, there were "no significant socioeconomic differences between Dorchester's Jewish and Catholic districts"- undermining the oft-cited theory that Jews migrated simply because they were more affluent or educated. Gamm also forthrightly confronts the violent crime, redlining, and blockbusting that affected residential behavior in the late 1960s and 1970s. Particularly valuable in Urban Exodus, however, is Gamm's treatment of the controversial Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (BBURG), which provided mortgage funds to low-income black families and was widely considered a pernicious scheme by real estate speculators who were targeting Jewish areas and exacerbating racial tension. Gamm coolly debunks the case against BBURG-especially important since, as he writes, "many scholars have inferred that similar banking programs contributed to the Jewish exodus from other cities."

Urban Exodus takes its place in an increasingly impressive collection of books on urban conflict from L.A. to Yonkers, which seriously consider the intricacies of geography (not to mention religion). To paraphrase that eminent Bostonian, Tip O'Neill, we're finally learning that a good deal of American history is local.

Tom Deignan has taught American history, film, and English at CUNY and Saint John's University. He is also working on a novel called Staten Islanders.