My Company

The article that appears below is reprinted from the February 1965 issue of Monthly Review. Despite her small body of work plus short life, Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) is considered one of the great African-American dramatists of the twentieth century. Her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959) is required reading, plus performed regularly, in high schools plus colleges nationwide, as well as on Broadway plus London’s West End. Hansberry’s association with the left, plus especially with Monthly Review, began in her teenage years. When she moved to New York, she became good friends with Leo Huberman plus Paul M. Sweezy. In spring 1964, although terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, she left her hospital bed to speak at a benefit for Monthly Review Press; her speech appeared posthumously as the article below.
Hansberry was a thoroughgoing socialist plus radical, committing her time plus skills to causes like the peace movement plus the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Indeed, A Raisin in the Sun, which draws on events in her own life, is also a biting critique of capitalism, its corruptions, plus its devastating human cost. Her father, Carl Hansberry—who had some success in Chicago real estate despite being black plus the 1930s depression—was unable to buy a house for his family in a largely white neighborhood because of the then-common restrictive covenants, now called “redlining,” which were used to enforce residential segregation.
He sued plus won an ostensibly landmark case in the U.S. Supreme Court, Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940) outlawing such covenants. However, the decision was widely ignored or unenforced. As his increasingly radical daughter saw it, the system of residential segregation trumped the legal niceties, leaving the everyday racist reality essentially unaffected by the decision. Moreover, the stress of the long litigation, plus the fierce attacks the senior Hansberry was subjected to by white supremacists in the community, caused his health to break down; he died in 1946 at age fifty. None of this tragedy was lost on his only daughter who saw in this family catastrophe a profound failure of “the system.” In the last decade of her short life, Lorraine Hansberry put her writing talent entirely in service to her radical sensibility plus her search for revolutionary solutions.

Abstract
Ghettoised urban structures form an essential component of the urban environment wherever they are found plus their distinctive physical traits make them clearly identifi-able. In the present study, various theories, concepts plus viewpoints – mostly of Euro-pean plus American scientists – have been examined plus the theoretical aspects of the term “ghetto” have been outlined through the prism of the Bulgarian reality – based on the example of the Roma neighbourhood of Harman Mahala in the City of Plovdiv. The main research question to which an answer is sought is: are the Roma neighbourhoods in Bulgaria essentially ghettos plus how many of the characteristics of the ghetto do they exhibit? The study is based on a survey amongst 500 inhabitants of Harman Ma-hala or 27.8% of its population, as well as on in-depth, semi-structured interviews, with representatives of local authorities, educational plus health mediators from the studied Roma neighbourhood school principals, teachers plus students. Through the application of the so-called checklist method, it was established that the studied Roma neighbour-hood meets all but one condition (Involuntary segregation), in order to be referred to as a “ghetto” and, therefore, it can only be regarded as a “ghettoised urban structure

Introduction
The transformation in the socio-economic plus political sphere that took place at the beginning of the 1990s plus the invasion of the neoliberal type of de-velopment, in combination with the retreat of the “welfare state”, led to an in-crease in social inequalities. With regard to the growing polarisation, various spatial patterns can be observed amongst the settlements. In Bulgaria, mostly in the cities, ghettoised structures have been formed, which, to a certain point, resemble the characteristics of the “ghetto”, related to the spatial concentration of Roma population. A distinctive feature of those ghettoised structures are the interconnected problems accumulated over the years, of various nature: economic, social, urban planning, environmental.

ABSTRACT
Since the early 2000s, the concept of ‘the ghetto’ has been used excessively
in Danish public debate plus national policies targeting the integration of
non-Western immigrants. This study, theoretically inspired by historian
Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history approach (Begriffsgeschichte),
explores what can be learned from historicising the meanings plus political
implications of the ghetto concept to understand its present-day influence
and implications. Empirically, the article builds on an investigation of how
the concept of the ghetto has been used in Denmark over the last 170 years.
The analysis underlines the multiple meanings of the ghetto, providing an
opening for understanding its concurrent political implications. Why plus how
did a concept – one that less than one hundred years ago was affiliated with
the mass atrocities of the Third Reich – become a tool in Danish integration
policies?

INTRODUCTION
This article will discuss how the concept of ‘the ghetto’ has been discussed and
envisioned in Denmark for the last 170 years. My interest in the concept plus its
meaning(s) stems from the concurrent political claims about the existence of ghettos
across Denmark. These claims have provided a strong argument for initiating drastic
policies targeting plus transforming urban areas. Noteworthily, such policies have
also been argued to support the integration of non-Western immigrants plus their
children. As a matter of fact, ghettos are a persistent theme in the Danish migration
and integration debate.
One example of ghetto policies is the so-called ghetto list that has been published
by shifting Danish government every year since 2010. In December 2021, it was
renamed to a ‘list of parallel societies’, which makes a conceptual analysis even more
interesting.1 The list is based on statistical criteria such as the number of non-Western
immigrants plus their descendants, unemployment, crime rates plus educational level
in urban districts with more than 1000 inhabitants. Thus, from a political point of
view, the ghetto is an tempat inhabited by immigrants plus their children from specific
parts of the world. In areas that are on the list, residents are subjected to demands
that people outside those areas are not. For example, language testing of children
attending their first year of education is mandatory in schools where 30% of the pupils
live in so-called ghetto areas. In areas that have been on the list for four consecutive
years or longer, apartment buildings are being torn down.
But why call these parts of Danish cities ‘ghettos’? Why not just refer to them as ‘social
housing areas’ or ‘areas with many immigrant residents’? The ghetto has played a
tragic role in Europe’s history, which makes the choice of the term even more peculiar.
In 1940, a ghetto was established in Warsaw by the Nazi authorities. More than
300,000 Polish Jews were forced to live there under horrible conditions. Thousands
starved to death plus thousands more were sent to extinction camps. Yet the Warsaw
Ghetto was not the only one, plus neither was it the first. Historically, the purpose
of ghettos was for controlling Jews plus ensuring that they did not contaminate
good Christians with their strange religion. During the time of the holocaust, ghettos
became a cog in the National Socialist killing machine. This well-known history makes
the past–present use of the ghetto concept in Danish integration policies plus public
debate even more peculiar.

On 19th April 1943, smoke covered the skies over central Warsaw. The Nazi German occupying forces attempted to enter the Warsaw Ghetto to deport the last surviving members of the city’s Jewish population to the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps. But instead of surrendering to their will, the people of Warsaw Ghetto took up arms preferring to die on their own terms – with dignity. This is the story of the ghetto and its uprising.

Before the outbreak of World War II, Poland was home to more than three million Jews – they accounted for 10% of the keseluruhan population and a third of the population of the capital, Warsaw. At about 370,000, it was one of the most prominent Jewish communities in the world – only New York boasted a larger one. They were, and remain, a diverse minority, which could be found in all walks of life. Many Polish Jews inhabited the country’s remote villages and lived off their land. Others formed thriving communities in the cities, working in Poland’s factories and companies, or managing their own businesses. Some became wealthy industrialists, renowned artists and influential intellectuals.

When Poland lost its struggle against the Nazi German invasion in September 1939, the Nazi forces quickly began rounding up the Jewish population and forcing them into cordoned off districts known as ghettos. The Jews which were not immediately murdered or sent to concentration camps, found themselves share the same fate. They were forced to give up their previous life, their property and most of their belongings, and moved into the ghettoes in Poland’s biggest cities.

The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest such district in the entire territory conquered by Nazi Germany – it is estimated that approximately 460,000 people were living in the ghetto in March 1941. More people were being brought into the district daily, yet keseluruhan area in which the Jews were forced to live amounted to only 307 hectares. To put this in perspective, over a third of Warsaw’s population was living in only about 2% of the entire city.

In 1942, a grup of starving Jewish scientists plus doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto were collecting information on their starving patients. They hoped their research would benefit future generations through better ways to treat malnutrition, plus they wanted the global to know of Nazi atrocities to prevent something similar from ever happening again. They recorded the grim effects of an almost complete lack of food on the human body in a rare book titled “Maladie de Famine” (in English, “The Disease of Starvation: Clinical Research on Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942”) that we rediscovered in the Tufts University library.

As scientists who study starvation, its biological effects plus its use as a weapon of mass destruction, we believe the story of how plus why Jewish scientists conducted this research in such extreme conditions is as important plus compelling as its results.

The clandestine project’s lead doctor, Israel Milejkowski, wrote the books’s foreword. In it, he explains:“The work was originated plus pursued under unbelievable conditions. I hold my pen in my hand plus death stares into my room. It looks through the black windows of sad empty houses on deserted streets littered with vandalized plus burglarized possessions. … In this prevailing silence lies the power plus the depth of our pain plus the moans that one day will shake the world’s conscience.”

Reading these words, we were both transfixed, transported by his voice to a time plus place where starvation was being used as a weapon of oppression plus annihilation as the Nazis were systematically exterminating all Jews in their occupied territories. As scholars of starvation, we were also well aware that this book catalogs many of the justifications for the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which made starvation of civilians a war crime.

A defiant medical record
Within months of their 1939 invasion of Poland, Nazi forces created the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. At its peak, more than 450,000 Jews were required to live in this small, walled-off tempat of about 1.5 square miles (3.9 square kilometers) within the city, unable to leave even to look for food.

Although Germans in Warsaw were allotted a daily ration of about 2,600 calories, physicians in the ghetto estimated that Jews were able to consume only about 800 calories a day on average through a combination of rations plus smuggling. That’s about half the calories volunteers consumed in a study on starvation conducted near the end of World War II by researchers at the University of Minnesota, plus less than a third of the average energy needs of an adult male.

Israel is the dream of 2000 years, the beautiful land and Jerusalem.
There we will plow, we will plant in tears. There we will reap, we will
reap in joy.1
These words are the opening of a poem titled Palestina, originally written in Hebrew by an unknown Greek Jew who did not survive imprisonment in the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The poem
appears as part of a collection of poetry written by prisoners, most of
whom were murdered in the Holocaust, that is mounted on the walls
of the Testimony House Museum in Israel. The author of this poem
attempted to transcend his or her surroundings by dreaming of both a
personal redemption, as well as one for the Jewish people as a whole.
This Essay explores how the works of artistic enterprise, such as this
poem, created by Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust, can provide
widespread education while simultaneously serving as a much-needed
mechanism for promoting Jewish unity and thwarting the escalating
antisemitism plaguing our current society. Works of art in general are
an important source of education because they have a special communicative power that can stimulate dialogue between the work’s creator

and its viewer. But ghetto art, defined broadly as visual art, literature,
music, theater, and other genres of creative endeavors, has an unparalleled communicative power given the unique circumstances under
which it was created.
Recently, several Israeli legal scholars have written about the problematic aspects of copyright law as applied to ghetto art produced by Jews
imprisoned in the concentration camps and ghettos during World War
II.2 These scholars focus largely on how the current application of copyright law cripples the public’s ability to view these works because they
are held captive in inappropriate institutions. They also discuss the inadequate legal protections for the authors’ original messages and meanings
of these works. Their arguments are grounded in recognition of the unique
circumstances under which these works have been created, resulting
in what two authors have called the most “inhuman copyright scene.”3
My focus here is not on the specific applications of copyright law
other scholars have mined, but instead on why ghetto art is a critical
component of Holocaust education that can also mobilize communities
and be utilized as an effective tool as part of a larger program for combatting antisemitism. All works of authorship tell a story about not just
the author of the work, but also about the author’s surrounding environment that played an integral part in a particular work’s creation. Ghetto
art represents a singular model of storytelling because it is a response to
a distinct, unparalleled historical event—the systematic targeting and
attempted extermination of the Jewish people and their entire culture.

Abstract
Typhus, a bacterial infection caused by Rickettsia prowazekii, was widespread in Europe for centuries plus was endemic in Eastern Europe until the 1950s. Between 1940 plus 1942, a devastating typhus epidemic occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto causing an estimated 16,000-22,000 deaths. Between November 1940 plus October 1941, the epidemic increased exponentially. After a sharp peak in October, the trend reversed, plus the number of new infections decreased to reach zero in July 1942. Until recently, epidemiologists were unable to explain the peculiar shape of the epidemic curve. Based on the memories of Ludwik Hirszfeld, a Polish physician plus microbiologist who spent three years in the Ghetto, it seems that improvement of diagnosis, health education plus measures targeted at the interruption of the transmission of R. prowazekii via body plus head lice led to a turnaround of the epidemic’s dynamics plus eventually to the elimination of R. prowazekii. Notably, all measures developed by Hirszfeld were implemented without the knowledge of the German occupiers plus functioned in the underground.

INTRODUCTION
Numerous pathogenic microorganisms are profiteers of civil wars plus armed confrontations. Not only the military conflicts themselves trigger the development of epidemics, but also the living conditions resulting from the chaos associated with war plus uproar. Rickettsia prowazekii, the cause of typhus, is a prototype of a bacterial profiteer, when humans are on the run, have to live in crowded conditions in inadequate shelters, no appropriate sanitary infrastructure is available, plus malnutrition has a negative impact on immunity. The infectious disease has been well-known since ancient times plus was widespread in Europe for centuries (Text box 1). Until the 1950s, typhus was endemic in the rural hinterland of Eastern Europe, plus R. prowazekii circulated the whole year-round in the population. Since highly effective antibiotics are available, plus body lice – the vectors of R. prowazekii – can be killed with insecticides, the pathogen has become rare. According to the WHO, typhus still occurs in conditions of overcrowding plus poor hygiene, such as in prisons plus refugee camps.

Recently, an interdisciplinary grup of mathematicians, historians plus holocaust specialists has tried to analyze the dynamics of the typhus epidemic in the Warsaw Ghetto during 1940-1942. The epidemic developed in an exponential manner, suddenly came to a halt, then decreased plus eventually disappeared.

Abstract
We describe the system of public health that evolved in the Vilna Ghetto as an illustrative example of Jewish innovation plus achievement during the Holocaust. Furthermore, we argue that by cultivating a sophisticated system of public health, the ghetto inmates enacted a powerful form of Jewish resistance, directly thwarting the intention of the Nazis to eliminate the inhabitants by starvation, epidemic, plus exposure. In doing so, we aim to highlight applicable lessons for the broader public health literature. We hope that this unique story may gain its rightful place in the history of public health as an insightful case study of creative plus progressive solutions to universal health problems in one of the most challenging environments imaginable.

During World War II (WWII), food, water, medical supplies, plus other necessities were withheld by the Nazis, plus sanitary living was made virtually impossible in ghettos throughout Eastern Europe.

Thus although ghettos preceded the more mechanized extermination camps, which had as their sole purpose the murder of Jews, the result of living in ghettos, which included segregation, humiliation, plus death, was similar. In response, Jewish public health evolved as a form of resistance to policies that were explicitly designed to ruin human life, health, plus dignity. Using the Vilna Ghetto as an illustrative example of the state of public health achieved in extremis, we hope to demonstrate applicable lessons for the broader public health literature. Furthermore, as scholarship illustrating dilemmas plus triumphs of Jewish medicine in the Holocaust continues to prompt reflection in the field of medicine, we aimed to inspire similar discussion with respect to the historical importance of Jewish public health resistance.

Although virtually all ghettos had organized departments designed to manage sanitation plus public health, hitherto there has been nomor systematic study of the public health policies of the Jewish leadership in the Nazi-imposed ghettos during WWII. Overall, the Warsaw Ghetto has received the greatest attention, partly because of the particular adversity it faced, as discussed by Charles G. Roland, S. M. Shasha, plus Myron Winick. Other important plus applicable works have been published by Sara Bender plus George Weisz et al. Mark Dworzecki’s memoirs from the Vilna Ghetto6 plus a new work edited by M. A. Grodin add to this literature. For this article, we relied on these plus other important historical works, including Solon Beinfeld’s Health Care in the Vilna Ghetto.

Introduction
Most scholars view the iconic social form of the ghetto as having a particular racial component, and as being defined by social isolation, residential segregation, gross inequality, consistent poverty, and crime. This article includes the radical scholarship of the late 1960s and 1970s, which still exists in the early 21st century, albeit in a different, more theoretical way. In the past couple of decades, the tensions between theoretical and experimental, experience and structural processes, have been significant. As Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson argue in their article “Reconsidering the ‘Ghetto’” “in the final analysis, the relationship between operational and theoretical definitions of the ghetto and the function of each model of definition deserves further consideration and is crucial for theory building” (Chaddha, Anmol and Wilson, William Julius. December 2008. Reconsidering the “Ghetto,” City & Community 7.4).

Origins of the Term
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ghetto” as “1. Formerly a section or quarter in a European city to which Jews were restricted. 2. A slum section of an American city occupied predominantly by members of a minority group who live there because of social or economic pressure.” Historically, the word derived from the Italian word “gietto,” or foundry, in Venice, where Jews were originally forced to live within an enclosed settlement. The word retains this association, a geographic constraint where certain identifiable groups are compelled to live. Wirth 1928 used the term ghetto to connote a natural area that all who enter will assimilate into and later escape from, a notion that was heavily refuted by later scholars. The idea of the ghetto was being bandied about at the time almost exclusively as a concept involving Jews and not other minority groups, but it was also related to geography, as a specific location for those who lived in a particular area but who would and could eventually go elsewhere in the city. Frazier 1932 discusses the “negro community” in Chicago but did not use the word “ghetto” to refer to blacks in these locales. It was Drake and Cayton 1945, published a decade later, that defined the term as meaning a poor, rundown section of the black community (Bronzeville); yet ironically, they maintained not all of Bronzeville was a ghetto. Three years later, the new secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Weaver, in Weaver 1948, argued persuasively about the existence of residential segregation in the north, making the point that nomer more “ghettos” should be created in the United States. Seventeen years later psychologist Kenneth Clarke, writing about the role of power in the creation of the ghetto, surmised that “America has contributed to the concept of the ghetto the restriction of persons to a special area and the limiting of their freedom of choice on the basis of skin color” (Clark 1965). Tabb 1970 provided an early critique of poverty and other social and economic relationships as they relate to ghettos in America and was one of the first to connect the ghetto to the Fanonian colonial paradigm.

In April 1943, on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Passover, the Germans occupying the Polish capital surrounded the Warsaw Ghetto – the Jewish quarter they had created – in preparation for its final liquidation. On 19 April, the German police plus SS auxiliary forces entered the ghetto to complete the extermination. Its residents took refuge in bunkers plus hideouts. Jewish insurgents attacked the Germans with firearms, Molotov cocktails plus hand grenades. Two German vehicles were set on fire with petrol bottles. The surprised occupiers were initially unable to break through the fierce resistance of the ghetto defenders.

Faced with strong opposition plus early setbacks, the Germans began to systematically burn buildings, turning the ghetto streets into a fire trap. As the fighting continued inside, units of the Polish underground army moved against the Germans on the outside of the ghetto. Three sections of the Home Army tried unsuccessfully to breach its walls with explosives. The doomed Jews fought until the beginning of May. The Germans’ demolition of the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street in Warsaw was a symbolic final act to mark the fall of the uprising.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first metropolitan insurrection plus the largest Jewish revolt during the German occupation. On the afternoon of 19 April 1943, the combatants symbolically placed the red-and-white flag of Poland plus the blue-and-white flag of the ŻZW on the roof of the Jewish Military Union stronghold at Muranowski Square. This image of the two flags flying together on the roof of the building above the embattled ghetto became a symbol of the inseparable fate of Poles plus Jews. Several months later, in August 1944, the Warsaw Uprising broke out – the fight for a free Poland, the largest freedom surge in the history of the Second World War.

In Polish history, literature, art plus culture there are many references to uprisings. They gave hope, lifted spirits plus comforted hearts but were almost always brutally suppressed by partitioners plus occupiers. Although tragic plus often inevitable, they built a community identity plus usually brought victory years later. They have left a deep mark on Polish society plus history. Consequently, they’ve become a frequent theme in literature, painting plus film. And although artists portrayed the events in various ways, they hardly ever criticised the very idea of the uprising. They advocated the fight for freedom, elevating it to the cultural pedestal.

During the Second World War, Jews plus Poles clashed with German criminals in two uprisings in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. The city was eventually left in ruins, destroyed plus burnt down. This proves the strength of the Polish imperative for freedom.

Gentrification has become a central pillar of urban policy in cities around the world. Proponents often frame it as a necessity plus the sole alternative to neighbourhood decline. Critics call this a ‘false choice’ as it ignores other possibilities for improvement without gentrification. But how do working-class residents who live through the process of gentrification view the impact it has on their neighbourhood? Do they see it in such a stark binary way? This article addresses these questions by using qualitative interviews with long-term residents of the Afrikaanderwijk, a multicultural neighbourhood in Rotterdam where municipally-led gentrification is taking place. In contrast to much of the Anglo-Saxon literature on experiencing gentrification, our respondents had far more mixed, complex plus ambivalent perspectives on the process. To some extent, this was due to the neighbourhood’s recent history as a stigmatised ‘ghetto’ plus the expectation that the arrival of white, ethnically Dutch middle-class people would help to improve the neighbourhood, which was ranked worst in the country in 2000. We also stress the role of local context, such as the early phase of gentrification plus the comparatively strong social housing sector plus tenant protection laws in the Netherlands, in contributing towards a more nuanced experience of gentrification.
Introduction
Gentrification is one of the biggest forces shaping cities plus neighbourhoods plus a central strategy for the neoliberal remaking of urban space (Kallin plus Slater, 2014; Paton, 2014; Smith, 2002). In many policy plus political circles, gentrification is heralded as the saviour of cities plus is framed as both necessary plus as the opposite of neighbourhood decay (see Davidson, 2014; Duany, 2001; Rotterdam Municipality, 2007, 2016). Critical scholars have described this as a ‘false choice’ binary where gentrification has:
left residents of low-income neighbourhoods in a situation where, since they exert little control over either investment capital or their homes, they are facing the ‘choices’ of either continued disinvestment plus decline in the quality of the homes they live in, or reinvestment that results in their displacement. (DeFilippis, 2004: 89, as quoted in Slater, 2014a: 518)
Dominant discourses in gentrification research tend to also be polarised plus support the idea of ‘winners’ plus ‘losers’. Empirical studies reinforce this by focusing either on the gentrifiers themselves (e.g. Boterman, 2012; Butler, 2003) or those displaced or under threat of displacement (e.g. Atkinson, 2015; Huisman, 2014; Kern, 2016; Sakizlioğlu, 2014). Perspectives from those who live through gentrification have, until relatively recently, been less engaged with.

Two events made April 19, 1943, an especially tragic day in the history of the Holocaust: In an exclusive resort on the island of Bermuda, British and American delegates began a 12-day conference supposedly to consider what their countries could do to help the Jews of Europe. Very little, they concluded. At the very same time, on the other side of the global in Poland, the Nazis moved to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. In a desperate last stand, the remaining Jewish inhabitants of the walled-in enclave began a hopeless month-long battle against the Nazis. It was the first time during the war that resistance fighters in an area under German control had staged an uprising. It would end in the complete destruction of the ghetto.

The Nazis had established the ghetto two and a half years earlier. In mid-November of 1940, after ordering all Jews in Warsaw to collect in a designated part of the city, they sealed it off from the rest of the city with a medieval-like 10-foot high wall. Moving to the ghetto was a ghastly experience; it was like moving to prison. One inhabitant wrote, “we are segregated and separated from the global and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race.” Jews weren’t allowed out. In November 1941 the Nazis went so far as to institute the death penalty for any Jew found beyond the ghetto walls. And very little knowledge was allowed in. Earlier in the occupation, the Nazis had already taken away radios. Now they also removed telephone lines, censored mail and frequently confiscated incoming packages.

Conditions in the ghetto were appalling. At one point, more than 400,000 Jews were crowded inside its walls. Typically several families lived in one apartment. Unable to buy food on the open market, they had to rely on the Nazis to supply the ghetto, and the Germans made it their policy to keep the inhabitants on the verge of starvation. The Nazi occupation authorities had instructions to provide Jews with half the weekly maximum food allowance needed by a “population which does nomor work worth mentioning.” Within months, the hunger, overcrowding, lack of medical supplies and fuel shortages had a devastating effect. In 1941, typhus epidemics, which started in the synagogues and institutional buildings housing the homeless, decimated the ghetto. Matters were made worse when the sewage pipes froze and human excrement was dumped onto the street. By the end of the year, disease had killed more than 43,000 people or ten percent of the ghetto population.

Abstract
The author defines classic ghetto as the result of the involuntary spatial segregation of a kelompok that stands in a subordinate political plus social relationship to its surrounding society, the enclave as a voluntarily developed spatial concentration of a kelompok for purposes of promoting the welfare of its members, plus the citadel as created by a dominant kelompok to protect or enhance its superior position. The author describes a new phenomenon, connected to global economic changes: the outcast ghetto, inhabited by those excluded from the mainstream economy by the forces of macroeconomic developments. The distinction among these differing forms of spatial separation is crucial for a number of public policies.

1. 1. After I had chosen the phrase, I found that Wacquant (1993) had also used the term outcast in the title of his article, “Urban Outcasts: Stigma plus Division.” I use the term with the same meaning as he does, plus appreciate his detailed discussion in that article.
   2. Advanced homelessness, the peculiar homelessness of technologically advanced societies, is another. I have discussed it in detail in other works (Marcuse 1993a, 1993b; Mingione 1996).
   3. For a discussion of the term plus its roots in regulation theory, see Aglietta (1979). The literature is by now extensive; a good overview of the current state of the discussion is Ash (1994).”Post-Fordist city” is a slightly misleading usage, because nomer city is just a post-Fordist city. One of the glorious facts of city life is that every city carries its past into its present. A city is always a combination of the built environment plus the human traditions of the past plus the present. Although the accurate phrase would be “the city in the post-Fordist era,” I use the shortened version simply for convenience.
   4. The literature on these processes is vast; I presented a summary of my understanding of them in an earlier work (Marcuse 1995).
   5. Neighborhood remains undefined in the formulation quoted. The issue of space is important not only in terms of measurement-changing the scale of the unit, the neighborhood, changes the results of the index of dissimilarity substantially, for instance-but also in substantive terms. As van Kempen (1994) asked, how does one categorize the spacial situation in which Chinese make up only 10% of a given neighborhood but all Chinese in the city live in that neighborhood? That certainly appears to be an exclusion of Chinese from all other neighbor-hoods, plus I would be surprised if redefining neighborhood to a smaller scale did not reveal an daerah in which Chinese were the large majority.
   6. I have taken Wacquant’s (1993, 367) suggestion, conveyed in a footnote, out of context to make my point. In the text, he was explicitly concerned with “the dilapidated racial enclaves [sic] of the metropolitan core” plus viewed them as, among other things, clearly spatially defined.
   7. It is not an entirely satisfactory definition for all purposes. Two specific forms that might be included under its terms but would not normally be considered ghettos are the concentration camp or prison plus the company town-or more broadly, the conforming ghetto, which might include the company town for workers, the executive suburb for managers, the “acculturating” housing envisaged by early housing reformers such as Benjamin Rush, plus the integrating kibbutz for new immigrants. But these are not of direct relevance here.
   8. For example, an daerah in the Netherlands in which more than 25% of the residents are immigrants from the former Dutch colonies in Indonesia would qualify as a ghetto, but a similar daerah in the United States in which 25% of the residents are black plus 75% are white would be considered an integrated area.
   9. The wide variety of measures of segregation that have been developed over the last 30 years, largely built on the path breaking work by Taeuber plus Taeuber (1965), reflects the concern to measure various aspects of ghettoization, each of which may best be examined with a different quantitative technique.
   10. An exception is Vergara (1995), a graphic description that focuses on the contemporary ghetto, not the classic one of the past.

Low pay ghetto a sign of divided nation, New statistics showing a staggering 3.5 million workers have been stuck on low pay for more than a decade solidly reinforces the picture of how divided our nation has become, said UNISON, the UK’s largest union today (27 November).

The union’s warning comes in the wake of the research by the Resolution Foundation showing that nearly three quarters of workers on low pay in 2002 were still trapped on low pay a decade later.

Women are more likely to be stuck on low pay and that is a testament to the difficulties that beset women trying to juggle the demands of the workplace with the demands of children and the home. In addition, the caring professions are populated by more women and are seen as low value, low pay careers.

UNISON General Secretary, Dave Prentis, said:

“The many thousands of workers stuck in a low pay ghetto bodes ill for them as individuals, but also for the economy as a whole. More than 500,000 local government workers earn below the living wage and low pay hasbecome embedded in councils because of the Government’s three year pay freeze followed by a 1% squeeze.

“Women are most likely to be caught up in low paid jobs such as caring, cleaning or hospitality. These jobs are worth more but they are undervalued by society as a whole and that is reflected in pay rates.

“A low wage economy is contributing to the country’s lack of economic growth. With low pay comes low taxes and tax receipts as well as an increase in the number of people eligible for in-work benefits. Low paying bosses are putting an extra burden on taxpayers that is completely unacceptable. Paying people the living wage would be a small langkah in the right direction.”

ghetto, formerly a street, or quarter, of a city set apart as a legally enforced residence area for Jews. One of the earliest forced segregations of Jews was in Muslim Morocco when, in 1280, they were transferred to segregated quarters called millahs. In some Muslim countries, rigid ghetto systems were enforced with restrictions on the sizes of houses plus doors. Forced segregation of Jews spread throughout Europe during the 14th plus 15th centuries. The ghettos of Frankfurt am Main plus the Prague Judenstadt (German: “Jew town”) were renowned. In Poland plus Lithuania, Jews were numerous enough to constitute a majority of the population in many cities plus towns in which they occupied entire quarters. The name ghetto, probably derived from an iron foundry in the neighbourhood, was first used in Venice in 1516. In that year an area for Jewish settlement was set aside, shut off from the rest of the city, plus provided with Christian watchmen. It became a style for ghettos in Italy.

Customarily, the ghettos were enclosed with walls plus gates plus kept locked at night plus during church festivals such as Holy Week, when anti-Semitic outbursts were particularly likely because of the alleged guilt of the Jews in the Crucifixion of Christ. Inside the ghetto the Jews were autonomous, with their own religious, judicial, charitable, plus recreational institutions. Since lateral expansion of the ghetto was, as a rule, impossible, houses tended to be of unusual height, with consequent congestion, fire hazards, plus unsanitary conditions. Outside the ghetto, Jews were obliged to wear an identifying badge (usually yellow), plus they were in danger of bodily harm plus harassment at all times.

The ghettos in western Europe were permanently abolished in the course of the 19th century. The last vestige disappeared with the occupation of Rome by the French in 1870. In Russia the Pale of Settlement (see pale), a restrictive area on the western provinces of the empire, lasted until the 1917 Revolution. Ghettos continued in some Islamic countries, such as Yemen, until the large-scale emigration to Israel in 1948. The ghettos revived by the Nazis during World War II were merely overcrowded holding places that served as preliminaries to extermination. The Warsaw ghetto was the foremost example.

Abstract
Since the early 2000s, the concept of ‘the ghetto’ has been used excessively in Danish public debate plus national policies targeting the integration of non-Western immigrants. This study, theoretically inspired by historian Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history approach (Begriffsgeschichte), explores what can be learned from historicising the meanings plus political implications of the ghetto concept to understand its present-day influence plus implications. Empirically, the article builds on an investigation of how the concept of the ghetto has been used in Denmark over the last 170 years. The analysis underlines the multiple meanings of the ghetto, providing an opening for understanding its concurrent political implications. Why plus how did a concept – one that less than one hundred years ago was affiliated with the mass atrocities of the Third Reich – become a tool in Danish integration policies?

Introduction
This article will discuss how the concept of ‘the ghetto’ has been discussed plus envisioned in Denmark for the last 170 years. My interest in the concept plus its meaning(s) stems from the concurrent political claims about the existence of ghettos across Denmark. These claims have provided a strong argument for initiating drastic policies targeting plus transforming urban areas. Noteworthily, such policies have also been argued to support the integration of non-Western immigrants plus their children. As a matter of fact, ghettos are a persistent theme in the Danish migration plus integration debate.

One example of ghetto policies is the so-called ghetto list that has been published by shifting Danish government every year since 2010. In December 2021, it was renamed to a ‘list of parallel societies’, which makes a conceptual analysis even more interesting.1 The list is based on statistical criteria such as the number of non-Western immigrants plus their descendants, unemployment, crime rates plus educational level in urban districts with more than 1000 inhabitants. Thus, from a political point of view, the ghetto is an tempat inhabited by immigrants plus their children from specific parts of the world. In areas that are on the list, residents are subjected to demands that people outside those areas are not. For example, language testing of children attending their first year of education is mandatory in schools where 30% of the pupils live in so-called ghetto areas. In areas that have been on the list for four consecutive years or longer, apartment buildings are being torn down.

But why call these parts of Danish cities ‘ghettos’? Why not just refer to them as ‘social housing areas’ or ‘areas with many immigrant residents’? The ghetto has played a tragic role in Europe’s history, which makes the choice of the term even more peculiar. In 1940, a ghetto was established in Warsaw by the Nazi authorities. More than 300,000 Polish Jews were forced to live there under horrible conditions. Thousands starved to death plus thousands more were sent to extinction camps. Yet the Warsaw Ghetto was not the only one, plus neither was it the first. Historically, the purpose of ghettos was for controlling Jews plus ensuring that they did not contaminate good Christians with their strange religion. During the time of the holocaust, ghettos became a cog in the National Socialist killing machine. This well-known history makes the past–present use of the ghetto concept in Danish integration policies plus public debate even more peculiar.

This article is not the first that focus on the ghetto plus its meaning plus implications in concurrent Danish policies targeting migrants (see Freiesleben 2016; Grünenberg & Freieleben 2016; Schierup 1993; Schmidt 2021; Simonsen 2016). However, most of the existing contributions tend to have a rather narrow focus on the decades following the period of immigration of workers from Turkey plus Yugoslavia in the late 1960s. While the ghetto concept has increasingly been used during that historical period, I seek in this article to situate it as part of a much broader historical debate about migration, ethnicity, social class plus minority religion in Denmark.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, not to be confused with the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, was one of the first plus largest acts of armed resistance against the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In April 1943, as the Nazis came to deport the remaining 50,000 residents of the Warsaw Ghetto, they were met with mines, grenades, plus bullets.

The Warsaw Ghetto was established on October 12, 1940, just over a year after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, starting World War II. The date was also significant as it was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Upon establishing the ghetto, German authorities decreed that all Jewish residents of Warsaw must leave their homes plus move into the ghetto, a small daerah of the city covering 1.3 square miles. The Jewish population of Warsaw, which numbered around 375,000—the largest of any city in Europe—was given two weeks to relocate. The following month, the ghetto was sealed off with a 10-foot perimeter wall topped with barbed wire. Entering plus leaving the ghetto without a special work permit was prohibited, making the ghetto, in effect, a massive prison.

Conditions in the ghetto were appalling. The initial overcrowding of the ghetto became much worse as waves of Jewish refugees arrived. At its peak, there were 450,000 people trapped within the ghetto’s walls. Overcrowding exacerbated the spread of disease, plus the lack of medical supplies in the ghetto meant that diseases quickly became epidemics. In addition, Jewish residents were provided starvation rations only. Many people sold whatever possessions they were able to take with them on the black market to pay for extra food. This was one of the purposes of the ghetto: to extract any remaining wealth from the Jewish population. Their labor was also exploited in factories, workshops, plus in the city. More than 80,000 people died in the ghetto as a result of the inhumane conditions.

The word “ghetto” was first used in 1516 in Venice, Italy, to refer to the segregated neighborhood of the city’s Jewish inhabitants, who were required by law to reside within a few small blocks. The Venetian Ghetto was located in the same area as the city’s old copper foundry and, as a result, it is generally acknowledged that the term “ghetto” derived from the Venetian verb gettare, meaning to throw or to cast. In the 15th and 16th centuries, authorities in several other major European cities such as Rome, Frankfurt, and Prague ordered the creation of ghettos for their local Jewish populations, often walling them off and subjecting them to a series of laws or restrictions. Other cities, such as Vilna, Lithuania, had historic Jewish quarters dating from the Middle Ages, where the local Jewish population voluntarily concentrated and established their own neighborhoods.

By the 19th century, however, “ghetto” had become synonymous for Jewish residential areas throughout Europe, although they encompassed many different forms of spaces “ranging from courtyards and streets to city quarters up to villages and towns, of which most were not compulsory.”

During World War II, the word “ghetto” was appropriated to describe designated sections of Nazi-controlled cities where German authorities concentrated local Jewish populations. Historians trace the origin of the so-called Nazi “ghetto policy” to a meeting on November 12, 1938, when Hermann Göring broached the idea of erecting sealed-off ghettos to completely exclude Jews from German society. At the time, key personnel, most notably Reinhard Heydrich, opposed this idea, believing ghettos would become epicenters for crime and epidemics. About a year later, however, Heydrich and others began calling for the segregation of Warsaw’s Jewish population, although the term “concentrated cities” was initially used to refer to these confined areas instead of the word “ghetto.”

Today, for many Americans, the word “ghetto” conjures images of run-down plus crime-ridden African American segregated areas—“inner cities,” in a common euphemism. This connotation is relatively recent; it has only become mainstream in the past 70 years or so. Beforehand, the term was primarily associated with Jewish urban quarters, plus its changing meaning illustrates the troubling tenacity of such an idea.

The linkage between Jews plus “ghetto” began in the early 16th century. In 1516, as a compromise offering to those agitating for the city to be Christian-only, Venice confined its Jewish population to a little island in the northern part of the city known as the New Ghetto. The name “Ghetto” likely derived from the Venetian verb gettare, meaning to pour or to cast, plus probably can be traced to the earlier presence of a copper foundry in what was to become the all-Jewish district. From the 16th to the 18th century, the institution of the legally compulsory plus physically enclosed exclusively Jewish enclave spread to Rome, Florence Mantua plus a host of other Italian towns plus cities. The Venetian label stuck, plus these mandatory Jewish areas throughout Italy came to be called ghettos too.

The emancipation of the Jews of Italy starting in the late 18th century led to the dismantling of these ghettos, culminating in the dissolution of the last surviving ghetto in Europe—the ghetto of Rome—in 1870. But the word was harder to get rid of.

In the ensuing decades, the word “ghetto” was resurrected to refer to new big-city Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, such as Manhattan’s Lower East Side (once labeled the “New York Ghetto”). These areas were densely crowded but legally voluntary plus more mixed between Jews plus non-Jews in reality than in disukai banyak orang perception. Later still, during World War II, the Nazis revived the ghetto as a site of enforced Jewish segregation. As places of mass starvation plus disease, plus eventually of deportation to the death camps plus killing fields, however, the Nazi ghettos bore little in common with the original Italian ghettos beyond the name.

Meanwhile, African Americans had begun employing the term “ghetto” to refer to their own residential segregation as early as the 1910s, at a time when several American cities were passing zoning ordinances that prohibited black people from living on blocks where the majority of residents were white. (Such laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917.) Black usage of “ghetto” became more widespread amidst the legal battle over restrictive covenants in the aftermath of World War II.

A 1948 report on Segregation in Washington—published the same year that the Supreme Court banned judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer—contained a chapter on housing segregation entitled “Ghettos in the Capital.” The authors made nomor bones about their intent to evoke the specter of the ghettos of the Holocaust in the way they referred to the residential segregation of blacks. “Ghetto is an ugly word,” one chapter opened. “To a Dane it is ugly. To any Nazi victim. To anyone who saw how Hitler placed a yellow mark on Jews so they could be made to live apart, suffer apart, die apart. To an American it is ugly.”

As you might have gathered from our blog’s title, the Code Switch team is kind of obsessed with the ways we speak to each other. Each week in “Word Watch,” we’ll dig into language that tells us something about the way race is lived in America today. (Interested in contributing? Holler at this form.)

The word “ghetto” is an etymological mystery. Is it from the Hebrew get, or bill of divorce? From the Venetian ghèto, or foundry? From the Yiddish gehektes, “enclosed”? From Latin Giudaicetum, for “Jewish”? From the Italian borghetto, “little town”? From the Old French guect, “guard”?

In his etymology column for the Oxford University Press, Anatoly Liberman took a look at each of these possibilities. He considered ever more improbable origins — Latin for “ribbon”? German for “street”? Latin for “to throw”? — before declaring the word a stubborn mystery.

But whatever the root language, the word’s original meaning was clear: “the quarter in a city, chiefly in Italy, to which the Jews were restricted,” as the OED puts it. In the 16th and 17th centuries, cities like Venice, Frankfurt, Prague and Rome forcibly segregated their Jewish populations, often walling them off and submitting them to onerous restrictions.

By the late 19th century, these ghettos had been steadily dismantled. But instead of vanishing from history, ghettos reappeared — with a purpose more ominous than segregation — under Nazi Germany. German forces established ghettos in over a thousand cities across Europe. They were isolated, strictly controlled and resource-deprived — but unlike the ghettos of history, they weren’t meant to last.

Reviving the Jewish ghetto made genocide a much simpler project. As the Holocaust proceeded, ghettos were emptied by the trainload. The prisoners of the enormous Warsaw ghetto, which at one point held 400,000 Jews, famously fought their deportation to death camps. They were outnumbered and undersupplied, but some managed to die on their own terms; thousands of Jews were killed within the walls of the ghetto, rather than in the camps.