For all the talk about NY being a "Jewish city" and metro area, it is actually VERY mixed. I should also mention that, at least among older folks, there was ALOT of anti-semitism among white Catholics, whether Irish, Italian, German, or Polish. Some of it was brought from the old country, some of it simple resentment of the meteoric rise of Jewish-Americans in American society relative to other ethnic groups. Jewish-Americans may talk of how they "loved" growing up around Italians, but they never knew what was said about the "mezzocristi" when they left the room.
BTW, as long as I'm on the thread, the Jewish military cemetery in Richmond was a section of the older Hebrew Cemetery on Shockoe Hill. I don't know if that makes it so different from other Jewish cemeteries where soldiers are buried or military cemeteries where Jewish veterans are buried. There were other Jewish military cemetery in the world, in Poland and Ukraine before the Nazis destroyed them.
Historically, where you have one great dividing line separating people, newcomers can be more readily accepted if they fall on the "right" side of the dividing line and make a contribution to that side. You can see the same phenomenon in South Africa, where Jews were quite successful in the early days of the country. Where society is more homogeneous or where it's fragmented along many different lines, each group tends to look out more for its own.
"mezzocristi"
HalfChrist?
I surmise you mean mazzacristi, ie ammazza Cristi.
Anyway, I had never heard the expression until now.