Others were not so fortunate. In 1967, New York City tore down 20 acres of dilapidated apartment buildings along the south side of Delancey Street, part of one of the ill-conceived, “slum clearance” projects that did so much to gut inner cities in the postwar years. Displaced were some 1,800, mostly poor, mostly Puerto Rican families, who were promised a chance to move in to the new public housing that would be built on the site.

They never did—thanks mostly to Silver and his confederates at the United Jewish Council (UJC), a leading neighborhood power. As Russ Buettner reported in The New York Times last year, Silver worked tirelessly for almost 40 years to see that no new housing ever got built there. His efforts were often surreptitious, Buettner wrote, at the behest “of Grand Street’s Jewish leaders,” who believed that “any development with affordable housing that replaced the cleared tenements would tilt the balance of the entire neighborhood.”

Considering how carelessly so much New York public housing was being thrown up at the time, how crime rates kept escalating, and how fraught race relations in the city were, it’s understandable that the Lower East Side’s shrinking Jewish community would have been cautious about what got built there. But unlike, say, a young Mario Cuomo, whose rise to power started when he worked out a compromise on public housing in Forest Hills at about the same time, Silver opposed any housing at the Delancey Street site. He even blocked a plan to build 150 units for senior citizens from Chinatown.

“They would rather have the vacant lots and rats than have minority people there,” Francis Goldin, a member of the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council, told the Times about Silver and his friends.

It’s difficult to adequately describe what a betrayal of America’s promise—of Silver’s heritage—this is. The Lower East Side is sacred ground in the history of immigrant America. It’s a unique place where, for some 175 years, waves of Irish and Germans, Italians and Eastern Europeans, Jews and Asians and Latin Americans, arrived one on top of the other, unwanted and despised. For a long time, the only people to welcome them were representatives of Tammany Hall, New York’s notorious political machine. A hundred years ago, the ward boss was another powerful state legislator, the legendary “Big Tim” Sullivan, who prided himself on helping individuals of all backgrounds to assimilate, and bragged about bringing what he called “my smart Jewboys” into the organization. (Among Sullivan’s “smart Jewboys”: the gangster Arnold Rothstein.)