Twin Cities Jewish newspaper.
“Krazy Klugman will buy all the property you have for sale on the North Side,” the ad read. “Watch your neighbors sell when our signs go up.”
Some Jews, seeing the ad, complained to the Jewish Community Relations Council that it was a form of blockbusting, and executive director Samuel Scheiner called Klugman to stop the ad from running anywhere else.
Klugman would pull the ad, but not before candidly defending himself as a product of the Jewish community. A JCRC report described that “Mr. Klugman remained adamant that he was entitled to run this kind of an ad.”
“[Klugman] indicated that he had not created the situation on the North Side but that the Jewish community had created the situation for itself by having made a mass exodus from the area…therefore there was nothing wrong with an individual taking advantage of the situation.”
The Rift of Blame and Anti-Semitism
By the late 1960s, most Minneapolis-area Jews and Jewish institutions had left Near North, and accusations of Jewish real estate exploitation morphed into full-blown attacks.
In 1969, the newspaper of The Way, a Black community center in Near North established after the Plymouth Avenue unrest, published a scathing editorial.
“Just because we have seen many Jewish slumlords own the rat and roach tenements and make no attempt to make these dwellings fit for human dwelling and fight against it; we are called antisemitic,” the editorial read. “Jewish brothers, have no fear, we are not antisemitic…we will fight anyone that is or attempts to exploit the Black Community.”
But Jewish leaders had a tough time engaging with what felt, despite the denials, to be a wave of anti-Semitism. The conversation was irreconcilable.
“We had all kinds of bitter attacks by the Blacks on ‘the Rothschilds of the North Side.’ They never said, ‘the Jews.’ It was ‘the Rothschilds,’” said Rabbi Kassel Abelson, then-rabbi of Beth El, in an interview with the St. Louis Park Oral History Project.
“They were talking, ‘Every revolution has to have its bloodshed.’ I remember responding, ‘But, you’re talking about my blood and I’m not going to shed it.’ So, there were bitter exacerbated feelings that grew and were never bridged between the Jews of the North Side and the Blacks.”
Across the country, as versions of the Near North story played out in other cities, those feelings stayed unresolved.