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…
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…
“Up to this point, there has not been a single book about electricity in Yiddish, aside from a few small pamphlets,” declared the engineer Israel Okun in January 1922. It was a bold, frank introduction to his new Yiddish translation of…
On a cold winter afternoon in February 1919, several hundred soldiers descended upon the Jewish neighborhoods of the small Ukrainian city of Proskuriv (today Khmel’nyts’kyi, Ukraine). Ten days earlier, Symon Petliura, head of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, had dispatched to the border city nearly…
On a humid summer’s night in July 1961, thirteen-year-old Ricky Farber and his friends bounced around their suburban neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. There, they stumbled upon an odd and frightening house draped in massive Nazi battle flags. What happened next would be a source of contention: Farber and…
