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Households jump 66 percent in decade; boundaries between 'Modern Orthodox,' 'black hat' blurring.
In a sign of the growing reach of the Orthodox community in New York City over the last decade, the Jewish character of the Upper West Side -- often perceived as the heart of progressive Judaism -- is being recast by an Orthodox boom.
Since 1990, according to figures not yet released from the Jewish Community Study of New York 2002, the number of Orthodox households on the Upper West Side shot up by 66 percent. In New York City overall, the Orthodox population rose from 13 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2001, according to the UJA-Federation-sponsored study.
The overall Jewish population on the Upper West Side dropped by 5,000 in the last decade, to 71,800, but the percentage of Orthodox increased significantly, from 8 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2001. There are now 5,194 Orthodox households on the Upper West Side among the 37,100 Jewish households.
And while it is not yet clear how many of those households are "black hat" and how many are Modern Orthodox, anecdotal evidence suggests that the black hat numbers are growing, though not in the traditional sense of the term.
The kind of so-called Modern Orthodoxy that once was prevalent on the Upper West Side is gone, by and large, replaced instead with a more rigid stream, according to Samuel Heilman, a Queens College sociologist and Jewish studies professor who has written extensively on the fervently Orthodox community.
"There has been a move to the right in Orthodoxy, there's no question about it," Heilman said. "The West Side may be one of the last strongholds of the young Modern Orthodox person. What we're seeing here is that even in this stronghold [of Modern Orthodoxy], you already have evidence of some haredization.
"The difference, and it is a critical one, is that while it may be cool to be haredi in Borough Park, it's still not cool to be haredi on the Upper West Side."
The distinction between Modern Orthodox and black hat, at least on the Upper West Side, may no longer even be valid as lines blur in a post-denominational age, observers say. The Orthodox population of the Upper...