lymouth Av.”
The most prominent realtor in Near North was Harvey Katzovitz, head of Hark Realty and on the board of directors of the men’s club at Beth El Synagogue. Hark Realty was described by the Star Tribune as “one of the most active in the Homewood area.” In a letter to Tillman about his real estate practices, Katzovitz described himself as “the only Realtor [sic] situated in this area.”
The accusations Tillman wrote about in 1964, though vague, were not baseless. Suffice it to say, for many Black North-Siders, the face of real estate exploitation was Jewish.
This reality can be chalked up to the actions of a few bad apples in the Jewish community. But that would miss the broader context of Near North, a neighborhood shaped by racist real estate policies like covenants and redlining that gave Jews access to the suburbs while driving the Black community into long-term poverty.
The legacy of this process is racial inequality, and Jewish opportunity, in Midwestern cities like Minneapolis today.
But these policies did more than divide Jewish and Black communities by geography and class. They turned the Jewish community — as a whole, unwittingly, and for some individuals, purposefully — into exploiters of Black people and contributors to ghettoization.
The exploitation chipped away at Black-Jewish communal relations and contributed to the explosion of civil unrest across Midwestern and northern cities in the late 1960s — which itself carved a greater rift between the two groups.
Today, “a lot of these issues bubble just beneath the surface,” said Steven Belton, the president and CEO of the Twin Cities Urban League. “Because of the press of time and other exigent circumstances, people move on to talk about other things. But when given an opportunity to pause and reflect…some of this stuff comes up.”
This story of exploitation also complicates a common narrative about why Minneapolis Jews left Near North for the suburbs. In a way, the community sealed its own fate.
For some Jews that used to live in Near North, “the excuse that they use [is]…’the riots caused us to leave, anti-Semitism caused us to leave,’” said Russell Star-Lack, a graduate of Carleton College who uncovered much of this Minneapolis Black-Jewish urban history, and several of the documents referenced in this story, in his senior thesis.
“Really, it’s the other way around,” he said. “Jews leaving…causes the beginning of the ghettoization process and this economic dislocation that increases these racial tensions and causes the [late-1960s unrest].”
Houses For Sale
There is no way to get around how absurd this sounds, but unwitting Jewish involvement in Black exploitation in real estate began with a simple act: Selling.
For Jews in Near North, there was nothing malicious about it. After World War II, the federal G.I. Bill provided cheap loans for buying a house in the developing suburbs.
Near North was crowded and full of old houses. So young Jewish families usually went to St. Louis Park instead, to raise children in comfortable new ramblers. As a tight-knit community, once the migration began, the older generations followed — and sold their North Side homes.
The move to St. Louis Park was quick. In 1936, almost 70% of Minneapolis-area Jews lived in Near North. By 1963, only about 25% were in Near North.
As Jews moved out of the city, many Black people were moving in, part of the second wave of the Great Migration. They were pushed into Jewish Near North by the segregated housing market. Jewish-owned homes became either rented housing, or the promise of homeownership for Black families.
But homeownership would not be as easy as the cheap housing loans that opened the suburbs to Jews. Because of redlining, Black people were refused loans to buy a house. And unable to buy a house anywhere other than Near North, prices skyrocketed.
As a result, the mundane act of selling a house became an exploitative profit opportunity for real estate agents.
In 1962, Earl Finlayson, a white man, decided to sell his home on Logan Avenue North, on Minneapolis’ North Side, and h