Mitchell Duneier Explains the Invention of the Ghetto, as Place and as Idea
The Zócalo Book Prize Winner Discusses the Evolution of Ethnic Enclaves, from Renaissance Europe to the Modern U.S.
When sociologist Mitchell Duneier was growing up in the 1960s, he said, “references to the word ghetto were references in my house and in my segregated Jewish community on Long Island to the Nazi ghettos.”
A half-century later, Duneier, a Princeton University sociologist, explained to an overflow audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that the word’s meaning has become vastly different. “If I teach a class on the ghetto at Princeton, students expect to hear about the ‘hood, and are astounded to hear about Jewish history the …
