The Ghetto in Global History explores the stubborn tenacity of 'the ghetto' over time. As a concept, policy, and experience, the ghetto has served to maintain social, religious, and racial hierarchies over the past five centuries. Transnational in scope, this book allows readers to draw thought-provoking comparisons across time and space among ghettos that are not usually studied alongside one another.

Table of Contents

• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The ghetto made and remade Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, Jr.
• PART I The early modern Jewish ghetto
• 1 Ghetto: Etymology, original definition, reality, and diffusion Benjamin Ravid
• 2 The end to confessionalism: Jews, law and the Roman ghetto Kenneth Stow
• 3 The early modern ghetto: A study in urban real estate Bernard Dov Cooperman
• 4 Venice: A culture of enclosure, a culture of control: The creation of the ghetto in the context of the early Cinquecento city Samuel D. Gruber
• PART II Nazi ghettos
• 5 “There was no work, we only worked for the Germans”: Ghettos and ghetto labor in German-occupied Soviet territories Anika Walke
• 6 Hunger in the ghettos Helene J. Sinnreich
• 7 “Am I my brother's keeper?”: Jewish committees in the ghettos of the Mogilev district and the Romanian authorities in Transnistria, 1941–1944 Gali Mir-Tibon
• 8 Jewish resistance in ghettos in the former Soviet Union during the Holocaust Zvi Gitelman and Lenore J. Weitzman
• 9 When (and why) is a ghetto not a “ghetto”?: Concentrating and segregating Jews in Budapest, 1944 Tim Cole
• PART III U.S. and African American ghettos
• 10 Shifting “ghettos” Established Jews, Jewish immigrants, and African Americans in Chicago, 1880–1960 Tobias Brinkmann
• 11 “Is a Negro district, in the midst of our fairest cities, to become connotative of the ghetto … ?” Using corpus analysis to trace the “ghetto” in the black press, 1900–1930 Avigail S. Oren
• 12 Constrained but Not Contained: Patterns of everyday life and the limits of segregation in 1920s Harlem Stephen Robertson
• 13 The American ghetto as an international human rights crisis: The fight against racial restrictive covenants, 1945–1948 Jeffrey D. Gonda
• 14 Unmaking the ghetto: Community development and persistent social inequality in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia Brian Purnell
• PART IV Urban locations, apartheid, and the ghetto in South Africa
• 15 “Their world was a ghetto” Space, power, and identity in Alexandra, South Africa's squatters’ movement, 1946–1947 Dawne Y. Curry
• 16 Citizens, not subjects Spatial segregation and the making of Durban's African working class Alex Lichtenstein
• 17 Location culture in South Africa Gavin Steingo
• Conclusion: Common themes and new directions Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, Jr.
• Bibliography