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
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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 Yorkerstaff 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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