Weequahic, Newark's Jewish Frontier

Weequahic is a Lenape word meaning head of the cove, and the neighborhood on Newark's southwestern edge took that name long before it became one of the most densely Jewish communities in American urban history. The great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen twenties pushed families westward from downtown Newark, and by the middle of the twentieth century Weequahic was a largely Jewish, middle-class neighborhood of small houses and apartment buildings. Weequahic High School became a national outlier: its graduates were famously likely to go on to college.

The novelist Philip Roth was born in Newark in nineteen thirty-three, grew up on Summit Avenue, graduated from Weequahic High in nineteen fifty, and spent his career writing the neighborhood into American literature. His novels American Pastoral and Nemesis are set here.