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Book Displays: Jewish American Heritage 5/24

A historical file on books on display at the Monroe University Libraries - and the occasion for which they were displayed

Jewish American Heritage Month - May 2024

Books at the Dr. Donald E. Simon Memorial Library (BX)

In My Father's Bakery

A remembrance of a neighborhood with all vignettes radiating from a bakery.

Lost in America : a journey with my father

A writer renowned for his insight into the mysteries of the body now gives us a lambent and profoundly moving book about the mysteries of family. At its center lies Sherwin Nuland’s Rembrandtesque portrait of his father, Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish garment worker who came to America in the early years of the last century but remained an eternal outsider. Awkward in speech and movement, broken by the premature deaths of a wife and child, Meyer ruled his youngest son with a regime of rage, dependency, and helpless love that outlasted his death. In evoking their relationship, Nuland also summons up the warmth and claustrophobia of a vanished immigrant New York, a world that impelled its children toward success yet made them feel like traitors for leaving it behind. Full of feeling and unwavering observation,

A Gay Synagogue in New York

A Gay Synagogue in New York recounts the communal experiences and personal dilemmas of the congregants of Beth Simchat Torah, the largest gay and lesbian synagogue in the United States.

In Black and White : the Life of Sammy Davis Jr.

He was, for decades, one of the most recognizable figures in the cultural landscape, his image epitomizing a golden age of American show business. His career spanned a lifetime. Now, in this surprising, illuminating, and compulsively readable biography, we are taken beyond the icon, into the extraordinary, singular life of Sammy Davis, Jr. In scrupulous detail and with stunning powers of evocation, Wil Haygood takes us back to the era of vaudeville. From then on it was a motherless childhood on the road, singing and dancing his way across a segregated America. With an ambition honed by poverty and an obsessive need for applause, Sammy drove his way into the nightclub circuit of the 1940s and 1950s, hustling his way to top billing and eventually to recording contracts. From there, he was to stake his claim on Broadway, in Hollywood, and, of course, in Las Vegas. He made his living entertaining white people but was often denied service in the very venues he played. Dragged into the civil rights movement, he witnessed a hatred that often erupted into violence. In his broad and varied friendships and alliances, he forged uncharted paths across racial lines. Ultimately, his only true sense of his identity was as a performer.

Black, White and Jewish ; Autobiography of a shifting self

Rebecca was bounced between white, Jewish, upper middle class suburbs, and her mother's "artisan" class lifestyle. Being black, white, and Jewish, but none of these things, Rebecca turned, chameleon-like, into whomever she needed to be, whether she was in Mississippi, Brooklyn, Washington, DC, the Haight, Westchester, the Bronx or Yale. Confused, and mostly alone, she turned to sex, drugs, books and a cast of characters who walked the edge. This is the story of a child's unique struggle for identity and home when nothing in her world showed her who she was. Poetic reflections on memory, time, and identity punctuate this gritty exploration of race and sexuality.

Catskill Culture : A mountain rat's memories of the great Jewish resort area

A century ago, New Yorkers, hungry for mountain air, good food, and a Jewish environment combined with an American way of leisure, began to develop a resort area unique in the world. By the 1950s, this summer Eden of bungalow colonies, summer camps, and over 900 hotels had attracted over a million people a year. His own waiter's tales, his mother's culinary exploits as a chef, and his father's jobs as maitre d' and coffee shop operator offer a backdrop to the vital life of Catskills summers. Catskill Culture recounts the life of guests, staff, resort owners, entertainers, and local residents through the author's memories. The Catskills resorts shaped American Jewish culture, enabling Jews to become more American while at the same time introducing the American public to immigrant Jewish culture. Catskills entertainment provided the nation with a rich supply of comedians, musicians, and singers. Legions of young men and women used the Catskills as a springboard to successful careers and marriages. 

The Complete Maus : Vol. 1 & 2

The definitive edition of the graphic novel acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust" (Wall Street Journal) and "the first masterpiece in comic book history" (The New Yorker) * PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * One of Variety's "Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read" A brutally moving work of art--widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written--Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author's father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.  Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.

The Chosen

"Anyone who finds it is finding a jewel. Its themes are profound and universal."--The Wall Street Journal It is the now-classic story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever considered before. In effect, they exchange places, and find the peace that neither will ever retreat from again. . . .

The Miracle of Intervale Avenue

Located in the ravaged urban landscape of th South Bronx, the Intervale Jewish Center was the last synagogue still in regular use in a rapidly changing neighborhood. The unique congregation represents the struggle of individuals to maintain their dignity, independence, and faith over the years. In The Miracle of Intervale Avenue,  the inspiring story of a community that continues to see the area as its own, as a place they steadfastly refuse to abandon despite a major shift in the ethnic demography. A classic ethnography of American Jewish life, has now been brought up to date. In a new closing chapter and epilogue, Kugelmass shows how the congregation has adapted to the radical changes in the neighborhood, bringing closure to this poignant work. Now with 38 photographs of the community over the years, the book covers the slow economic resurgence of the South Bronx.

The Caine Mutiny

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a perennial favorite of readers young and old, Herman Wouk's masterful World War II drama set aboard a U.S. Navy warship in the Pacific is "a novel of brilliant virtuosity" (Times Literary Supplement). Herman Wouk's boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life--and mutiny--on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II. In the intervening half century,

Mayor : an autobiography

Mayor Ed Koch tells of his (then) five years as mayor of New York City, bringing the city back to financial health from the brink of insolvency

Live and Be Well : a celebration of Yiddish culture in America

Like a warm family album, this lively book heralds and documents the rich and vibrant traditions of Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their children in "the golden land," from the first arrivals to the Second World War. Meet the famous, the infamous, and the unknown--from hotelier Jenny Grossinger to mobster Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik to Moses Solomon, the would-be "Jewish Babe Ruth;" from anarchist Emma Goldman to entertainer Eddie Cantor. Share the struggles and the triumphs of the labor unions, of Yiddish playwrights and poets. Enter the sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side and the first Jewish settlements in Los Angeles and Chicago. Taste pastrami from Canter's Deli in Los Angeles, knishes from Yonah Shimmel's in New York City.

Books at the New Rochelle Campus Library

East River : a novel

Two immigrant families struggle to adjust to a new way of life and find happiness in New York City during the early 1900s

World of Our Fathers

World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.

The Promise

For young Reuven Malter, it a time of testing. With his teachers, he struggles for recognition of his boldly radical methods of scholarship. With his old friend Danny Saunders--who himself had abandoned his legacy as the chosen heir to his father's rabbinical dynasty for the uncertain life of a healer--he battles to save a sensitive boy imprisoned by his genius and rage, defeated by the same forces of an unyielding past that challenge Reuven.

It Can Happen Here : White power and the rising threat of genocide in the U.S.

It Can Happen Here demonstrates that, rather than being exceptional, such white power extremism and the violent atrocities linked to it are a part of American history. And, alarmingly, they remain a very real threat to the US today. Alexander Hinton explains how murky politics, structural racism, the promotion of American exceptionalism, and a belief that the US has have achieved a color-blind society have diverted attention from the deep roots of white supremacist violence in the US's brutal past. It Can Happen Here is an essential new assessment of the dangers of contemporary white power extremism in the United States. While revealing the threat of genocide and atrocity crimes that loom over the country, Hinton offers actions we can take to prevent it from happening, illuminating a hopeful path forward for a nation in crisis.

At the Edge of a Dream : the story of Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East Side

This beautiful book tells the nostalgic tale of how millions of Jewish immigrants entered America through the portal of the Lower East Side. There in New York City they struggled and ultimately flourished in a neighborhood that was the center of Jewish work, family, and culture. For more than fifty years, the Lower East Side spawned newly-mined Americans, including entertainment icons like George Burns and Ira Gershwin, gangsters like Meyer Lansky, and an extraordinary array of people who would go on to transform American society.     

Sandy Koufax : a lefty's legacy

The instant New York Times bestseller about the baseball legend and famously reclusive Dodgers' pitcher Sandy Koufax, from award-winning former Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy. Sandy Koufax reveals, for the first time, what drove the three-time Cy Young award winner to the pinnacle of baseball and then--just as quickly--into self-imposed exile.

Lower East Side Memories : a Jewish place in America

Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. With the possible exception of African-Americans and Harlem, no ethnic group has been so thoroughly understood and imagined through a particular chunk of space. Despite the fact that most American Jews have never set foot there--and many come from families that did not immigrate through New York much less reside on Hester or Delancey Street--the Lower East Side is firm in their collective memory. Whether they have been there or not, people reminisce about the Lower East Side as the place where life pulsated, bread tasted better, relationships were richer, tradition thrived, and passions flared. This was not always so. During the years now fondly recalled (1880-1930), the neighborhood was only occasionally called the Lower East Side.

Jewish Cooking in America

This rich tapestry of more than three centuries of Jewish cooking in America gathers together recipes, old and new. They come from both Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews who settled all over America, What makes Jewish cooking unique is the ancient dietary laws that govern the selection, preparation, and consumption of observant Jews. Food plays a major part in rituals past and present, binding family and community. It is this theme that informs every part of Joan Nathan’s warm and lively text. Every dish has a story–from the cholents Joan Nathan tells us how lox and bagels and Lindy’s cheesecake became household words, and how American products like Crisco, cream cheese, and Jell-O changed forever Jewish home cooking. They are seasoned with Syrian, Moroccan, Greek, German, Polish, Georgian, and Alsatian flavors, and they represent traditional foods tailored for today’s tastes as well as some of the nouvelle creations of Jewish chefs from New York to Tuscon.

Holy Days : the world of a Hasidic family

Combining a historical understanding of the Hasidic movement with a journalist's discerning eye, Harris captures in rich detail the day-to-day life of this traditional and often misunderstood community. Harris chronicles the personal transformation she experienced as she grew closer to the largely hidden men and women of the Hasidic world.

               THIS RESEARCH OR "LIBGUIDE" WAS PRODUCED BY THE LIBRARIANS OF MONROE UNIVERSITY             

    EMAIL: library@monroeu.edu -- Bronx Campus (646) 393-8333 / New Rochelle Campus (914)-740-6437