First Things RSS Feed - Maria Poggi Johnson https://www.firstthings.com/author/maria-poggi-johnson en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:52:02 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/maria-poggi-johnson 60 Us and Them https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/11/us-and-them https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/11/us-and-them Mon, 01 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500 Six months out of grad school and into our first jobs, my husband and I fell in love with a house, a beautiful, eccentric Victorian. It was, of course, a fixer-upper, with a few caved-in ceilings, and it stood on a block that might be called borderline—there were some neglected houses nearby with bad landlords and worse tenants, a certain amount of drug activity, and there had been a shooting across the road the month before. This was why we could afford the house. On the plus side, there were a number of long-established stable families, and on the next block was a synagogue that was the center of a growing community of strictly observant Orthodox Jews. We persuaded ourselves that things couldn’t get too bad, took a gamble, and bought the house.

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