When it first opened in 1903, the Williamsburg Bridge was nicknamed the “Jews’ highway” for the sheer amount of Jewish New Yorkers leaving the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side for a better life across the water. By the 1960s, however, the children and…
A 1926 antisemitic pamphlet documents the antisemitic moral controversy surrounding the Jewish publishers that helped pioneer early French comic strips.
In the collections of YIVO Library at the Center for Jewish History rests an unassuming, yet unsettling French pamphlet from 1926 titled…
In 1939, Batman debuted in Detective Comics issue twenty-seven with a May cover date. The comic book hit newsstands, according to copyright records, on March 30. Eighty-seven years later, copies of this rare piece of Americana sell for nearly two million dollars. Batman helped build the comic book industry and laid the…
At the end of the summer of 1955, Jewish novelist Herman Wouk’s (1915-2019) fourth novel, Marjorie Morningstar was published. At this point in his career, Wouk was a celebrity-writer, having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his war novel, The Caine Mutiny…
As I demonstrate in my critical study Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature, the Yiddish children’s literary canon that burgeoned on the secularist left during the first half of the twentieth century forms a rich archive for revisiting the anxieties and ideas…
