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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

@rafram I don't think there is any doubt people who are jewish have had an important cultural influence on US media - Robert Crumb, MAD magazine etc - and some of their cultural background plays a part in that...but the whole idea of the 'new world' USA was assimilation in that '30's era, not celebrating ethnicity and past backgrounds.

'Jewish immigrants essentially invented the superhero genre' is a real stretch in this context. There were plenty of other cultural influences, particularly Japanese, in book and comic form that predate and were major influences on the US golden age of comic book explosion in popularity.

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> but the whole idea of the 'new world' USA was assimilation in that '30's era, not celebrating ethnicity and past backgrounds.

Jews, along with Blacks, were seen as outsiders to be marginalized by large sections of the dominant US culture at the time. Not as Whites to be assimilated. This is what makes Superman becoming such a large part of pop culture interesting.

And if you think the whole idea of the US at that time was about assimilation, not celebrating ethnicity, look up the "German American Bund" (I'd give you a link but have to restart Firefox).

'Jews, along with Blacks, were seen as outsiders to be marginalized by large sections of the dominant US culture at the time'.

I know this is the popular broad stroke concept of between wars American culture but in reality it was a lot more varied. The 'United States' was anything but united in that era. Huge numbers of blacks where migrating north to Chicago to work in manufacturing, different states had very different relationships with ethnicities and religions. NYC was always a very Jewish city for example.

Another example of rejecting assimilation and celebrating other cultures were the German American Bund as you note, with large rallies etc celebrating the German National Socialist movement by German immigrants.

Until the 1920s, something close to 80% of all houses in Chicago were covered by enforceable restrictive covenants preventing Black families from moving in:

https://www.chicagocovenants.com/

(I volunteered for this project, will do so again soon, and recommend it; it's super fascinating, and if you go shoot me an email).

Redlining, the practice of refusing to underwrite mortgages in predominantly Black neighborhoods, continued up through around 1970.

The entire city of Chicago is defined by these apartheid-styled racial boundaries. I live in Oak Park, across Austin Blvd. from an almost totally Black neighborhood; Oak Park exists precisely because it was not redlined, and so wealthy white families could feel comfortable buying homes there. I grew up in Beverly, where a similar border exists at around 90th and Ashland:

https://interactive.wttw.com/firsthand/segregation/mapping-c...

You can look at where all the crime is in Chicago and see a map of C and D-graded tracts today. When Uber first launched here, their service map resembled these maps as well!

And! Lots of infrastructure projects were designed to enforce redlining or to break up political power bases of previously marginalized minorities that were starting to gain power. UIUC and the Dan Ryan were plopped down where they are for those ends.

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