by Hasia R. Diner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2000
Admirably researched, this offers a perceptive revisionist analysis of American Jewry’s most distinctive former address.
A provocative account of how the Lower East Side of New York became a mythical citation in the American Jewish narrative.
Diner (American Jewish History/New York Univ.) contends that the Lower East Side has played a far greater role in the collective memory of American Jews than it actually played in their lives. Beginning in the 1940s, he maintains, American Jews had a need to create a “sacred” space, apart from their non-Jewish neighbors, to help shape the identity they were beginning to lose. The author documents how they created this with texts, movies, museum exhibits, and walking tours that celebrated the Lower East Side, repackaging it as the ethnic alternative to the sterile suburbs to which most Jews had since moved. The earliest text to romanticize the Lower East Side was Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family, which affected thousands of post-WWII Jewish sensibilities. Unlike the earlier novels of Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, or Abraham Cahan (which realistically reflected the neighborhood’s poverty, distress, and strife), the All-of-a-Kind Family series presented a cheerful family whose spirited children rushed home from the library to prepare for the joys of the Sabbath. The glowing misrepresentation of the Lower East Side, contends Diner, got its brightest in the 1960s, when the counterculture hungered for authenticity and bemoaned their parents’ assimilation into the vacuous mainstream culture. Ethnic identity was in, and the Lower East Side became the perfect metaphor. While this metaphor is powerful, Diner insists that it is flawed. For one thing, he points out that focusing on the Lower East Side ignores the vibrant culture of the uptown German Jews who immigrated before the Eastern Europeans. Furthermore, he asserts that neighborhoods such as Brownsville, Brooklyn (95 percent Jewish in the early 1920s), were far more “kosher” than the Lower East Side. Whether it deserves to be or not, however, Diner concedes that the Lower East Side remains synonymous with the American Jewish past.
Admirably researched, this offers a perceptive revisionist analysis of American Jewry’s most distinctive former address.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-691-00747-0
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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