The Ghetto

A Very Short Introduction

By: Bryan Cheyette

Narrated by: Julian Elfer

For 300 years the ghetto defined Jewish culture in the late medieval and early modern period in Western Europe. In the 19th century it was a free-floating concept that traveled to Eastern Europe and the United States. Eastern European "ghettos", which enabled genocide, were crudely rehabilitated by the Nazis during World War Two as if they were part of a benign medieval tradition. In the United States, the word ghetto was routinely applied to endemic black ghettoization which has lasted from 1920 until the present. Outside of America "the ghetto" has been universalized as the incarnation of class difference, or colonialism, or apartheid, and has been applied to segregated cities and countries throughout the world.

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Bryan Cheyette unpicks the extraordinarily complex layers of contrasting meanings that have accrued over 500 years to ghettos, considering their different settings across the globe. He considers core questions of why and when urban, racial, and colonial ghettos have appeared and who they contain. Exploring their various identities, he shows how different ghettos interrelate, or are contrasted, across time and space, or even in the same place.

©2020 Bryan Cheyette (P)2020 Tantor

GOOD

As mentioned, this is a very short introduction.
If you have never studied the “ghetto “ phenomena then this is a good introduction.
If you have then it is a well written comprehensive introduction.
The narrator is excellent.
My thanks for the free book and for all involved, JK.

A very good, concise summary of a centuries-spanning topic!

This was a very interesting, insightful exploration of the concept of the ghetto and how it has been used/not used, how people have projected imagined versions of the ghetto onto the past, and how all that impacts the idea of ghettos today (or how different ghettos today are from those past ones!). A really enlightening listen.