The National Book Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories ( The New York Times).Though some moved on to ...

"[A] fine biography . . . Sorin traces the shifts and turns in a life that wound up creating one of America's most thoughtful leftists." — The Washington PostA New York Times "Notable Book of the Year"Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award for HistoryDeeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to ...

Originally published in 1951 and reissued in 1966 this book combines stimulating biography with sound literary criticism in its account of a writer who observed America’s great nineteenth century change from an agrarian to an industrial society. Irving Howe places Anderson in the cultural context of his times and gives a fresh and balanced judgment both of his virtues and limitations. As an artist, the author of Winesburg, Ohio and Dark Laughter was over-valued and then i...

Originally published in 1976, this monumental volume is a study of one of the major migrations of modern times – the result of which has been significantly to alter the history of the United States and of the whole Middle East. In researching this volume, the author drew on many different sources, including the rich materials of the Yiddish press and the vast number of memoirs written in both English and Yiddish. The book traces the historical, cultural and social experience of the immigra...

Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America’s most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe’s work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nati...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories (the New York Times).Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements. Like others before and a...

A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-era immigrant experience in New York City.Now with an exciting new preface by rock musician Lou Reed (Delmore Schwartz’s student at Syracuse), In Dreams Begin Responsibilities collects eight of Schwartz’s finest delineations of New York’s intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. As no other writer can, Schwartz captures the speech, the generational conflicts, the mocking self-analysis of educated, ambitious, Depression-st...

This pioneering effort links history and personality, by pairing intellectual friends and foes, most notably Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, but also Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, T.E. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell, and lesser known figures. The periods range from the early 1830s, when Carlyle and Mill discovered each other, to 1975, when Lionel Thrilling died and the relationship with Howe ended. The essay that gives this volume its title is also the most ambitious. Alexander exam...

The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy is a wide-ranging anthology of criticism devoted to the literary, cultural, and political work of the writer Irving Howe. The book offers a broad cross-section of critical and biographical writings about Howe. Collected here are assessments of Howe's work written by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, and Arthur...

First published in German in 1905 as Das Wesen des Judentums, Leo Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism is perhaps the most widely read example of German Jewish scholarship in the 20th century. Written as a response to Adolf von Harnack’s lectures Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), the book seeks to both define the fundamental principles of Judaism, and contrast them with other religions. But by outlining Judaism’s essence, Baeck also shows how th...

Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson’s masterpiece, a work in which he achieved the goal to which he believed all true writers should aspire: to see and feel “all of life within.” In a perfectly imagined world, an archetypal small American town, he reveals the hidden passions that turn ordinary lives into unforgettable ones. Unified by the recurring presence of young George Willard, and played out against the backdrop of Winesburg, Anderson’s loosely con...

This book, first published in 1979, is a representative sample of some of the best articles that have appeared in DISSENT, the American democratic socialist quarterly. They provide a two-sided view of political and social action with the democratic society of the USA.