NONFICTION - Feb. 2, 1992

THE DEATH OF AN AMERICAN JEWISH COMMUNITY by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon (The Free Press: $24.95; 400 pp.) Keep in mind, as you read this chilling tale of sinister city planning, the old saw, “United we stand, divided we fall.” In 1967, the city of Boston implemented what seemed, at the time, to be an ambitious, honorable desegregation program. It was decided that banks would actively attempt to make mortgage loans available to blacks only on properties in the long-established Jewish neighborhood of Dorchester, not in Irish and Italian neighborhoods. The rationale was that the Jews were known to be a more tolerant community--though that seemed a convenient way to diffuse growing racial tension while protecting the ethnic integrity of those other neighborhoods. Realtors put the plan into effect by playing on the Jewish community’s fears, fears often created by realtors who held contests to see who could concoct the most outrageously threatening scenario, and so persuade a Jewish family to sell and move out. One realtor told the parents of a 12-year-old girl to worry about rapists; when families like that one fled, the realty and banking communities accused them of racism. This is the painstakingly researched story of one minority fleeing imagined terrors and another minority resenting the abandonment of its community by its founders, while the puppeteers who manipulated them both profited from the discord.