Eutaw Place (looking north), Baltimore, Md.’, circa 1897. Area known as home to the wealthy, particularly the affluent German-Jewish community of Baltimore. From “A Tour Through the New World America”, by Prof. Geo. R. Cromwell. [C. N. Greig & Co., London, circa 1897]. Artist Unknown. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)
Podcast: Seth Kaplan
Neighborhoods have always played a distinctly important role in American public life. The neighborhood is the most intimate public setting outside of the home, the place where mediating institutions of common life—schools, stores, gyms, houses of worship—connect citizens to each other. American neighborhoods, however, have lately grown fragile and unhealthy, reflecting the nation’s loneliness epidemic, its underwhelming public education system, its demoralized society.
Seth Kaplan is the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, a new book that diagnoses these dilemmas and that offers practical steps to nurse neighborhoods back to health. He joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to discuss how Jewish neighborhoods might serve as models that could inspire other communities in the United States.