Ghetto

The image of the ghetto was applied to a variety of situations. The Oxford English Dictionary records ghetto as referring in 1887 to a neighborhood of book dealers. In 1903, Jack London compared the ghetto to the misery of slums inflicted on workers—only a small percentage of them Jews—by the unrestrained operation of laissez-faire economics:

At one time the nations of Europe confined the undesirable Jews in city ghettos. But today the dominant economic class, by less arbitrary but nonetheless rigorous methods, has confined the undesirable yet necessary workers into ghettos of remarkable meanness and vastness. East London is such a ghetto, where the rich and the powerful do not dwell, and the traveler cometh not, and where two million workers swarm, procreate, and die.

The areas of first settlement by the mass immigration of Russian and Polish Jews to the United States, between 1880 and 1924, were called ghettos. Some earlier settlers considered these immigrants—like those from Italy, Poland, Scandinavia, and Asia—threats to American morality, hygiene, economics, and race. The immigrant "ghetto slums" lasted for a generation or two, until most inhabitants moved away or became invisible by learning English and adopting the manners and clothing of the country.