The Book examines why white ethnics left the inner city of Boston which became almost exclusively minority. 50,000 Jews lived in the Franklin Park/Franklin Field Blue Hill Avenue area of Boston as recently as the 50s and today they are all gone.

The title suggests that Jews left and Catholics didn't. The author demonstrates that Jewish institutions such as synagogues were portable and that most of the major synagogues moved from Boston to the suburbs. The author shows that Catholic institutions cannot move and that parishioners must worship at the church where they live. However, the author shows that most white Catholics also left as the African-American population expanded south. The churches remained to serve a non-white Catholic population, particularly immigrants from Haiti and Central and South America. The author does not address how it might have been possible to build a stable, multi-racial community in Boston. He underestimates the effects of the BBURG line, blockbusting, and redlining in the process of neighborhood transition here. He devotes inadequate attention to efforts at community building, crime watches and such that would have assisted in attacking the breakdown of order which impacted the change in neighborhood.

The author does show that Jewish movement to be suburbs began as early as the 20s and that those remaining in Boston were largely older and poorer. As the institutions moved out, anyone who could moved as well, to Newton and Brookline, or south to Sharon and towns around it. Catholic movement south out of Boston accelerated with the school desegregation decision in 1975.

Worth reading for a provocative thesis, even if I don't agree with most of it. Should be compared to Levine and Harmon's Death of an American Jewish Community which is a different take on the same events. This is a sad description of the rather sudden end to a once viable urban community.