In this book, Alfred Kazin, who for more than 30 years has been one of the central figures of America's intellectual life, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York's innermost intellectual circles; strong and intimate revelations of many of the most important writers of the century; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the context of America's shifting political gales.

In 1825, Mordecai Noah, a New York politician and amateur playwright possessed of a utopian vision, summoned all the lost tribes of Israel to an island near Buffalo in the hope of establishing a Jewish state. His failed plan, a mere footnote in Jewish-American history, is the starting point for Ben Katchor's brilliantly imagined epic that unfolds on the streets of New York a few years later. A disgraced kosher slaughterer, an importer of religious articles and women's hosiery, a pilgrim peddling soil from the Holy Land, a latter-day Kabbalist, a man with plans to carbonate Lake Erie--these are just some of the characters who move through Katchor's universe, their lives interwoven in a common struggle to settle into the New World even as it erupts into a financial frenzy that could as easily leave them bankrupt as carry them into the future.

Winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award, presented by the National Jewish Book Council New York Jews, so visible and integral to the culture, economy and politics of America’s greatest city, has eluded the grasp of historians for decades. Surprisingly, no comprehensive history of New York Jews has ever been written. City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, a three volume set of original research, pioneers a path-breaking interpretation of a Jewish urban community at once the largest in Jewish history and most important in the modern world. Volume I, Haven of Liberty, by historian Howard B. Rock, chronicles the arrival of the first Jews to New York (then New Amsterdam) in 1654 and highlights their political and economic challenges. Overcoming significant barriers, colonial and republican Jews in New York laid the foundations for the development of a thriving community. Volume II, Emerging Metropolis, written by Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, describes New York’s transformation into a Jewish city. Focusing on the urban Jewish built environment—its tenements and banks, synagogues and shops, department stores and settlement houses—it conveys the extraordinary complexity of Jewish immigrant society. Volume III, Jews in Gotham, by historian Jeffrey S. Gurock, highlights neighborhood life as the city’s distinctive feature. New York retained its preeminence as the capital of American Jews because of deep roots in local worlds that supported vigorous political, religious, and economic diversity. Each volume includes a “visual essay” by art historian Diana Linden interpreting aspects of life for New York’s Jews from their arrival until today. These illustrated sections, many in color, illuminate Jewish material culture and feature reproductions of early colonial portraits, art, architecture, as well as everyday culture and community. Overseen by noted scholar Deborah Dash Moore, City of Promises offers the largest Jewish city in the world, in the United States, and in Jewish history its first comprehensive account.

The definitive history of Jews in New York and how they transformed the city Jewish New York reveals the multifaceted world of one of the city’s most important ethnic and religious groups. Jewish immigrants changed New York. They built its clothing industry and constructed huge swaths of apartment buildings. New York Jews helped to make the city the center of the nation’s publishing industry and shaped popular culture in music, theater, and the arts. With a strong sense of social justice, a dedication to civil rights and civil liberties, and a belief in the duty of government to provide social welfare for all its citizens, New York Jews influenced the city, state, and nation with a new wave of social activism. In turn, New York transformed Judaism and stimulated religious pluralism, Jewish denominationalism, and contemporary feminism. The city’s neighborhoods hosted unbelievably diverse types of Jews, from Communists to Hasidim. Jewish New York not only describes Jews’ many positive influences on New York, but also exposes their struggles with poverty and anti-Semitism. These injustices reinforced an exemplary commitment to remaking New York into a model multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious world city. Based on the acclaimed multi-volume set City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York winner of the National Jewish Book Council 2012 Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award, Jewish New York spans three centuries, tracing the earliest arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam to the recent immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Alfred Kazin, one of the central figures of America’s intellectual life in the 20th century, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses, within a single large, fluent narrative, a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York’s innermost intellectual circles; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940’s, ’50’s, and ’60’s in the context of America’s shifting political gales. Kazin begins his story in 1940, where we see him first as a young man working for The New Republic, then for Fortune in the time of James Agee. We see him in wartime London; as traveler, after the war, in Italy, Germany, Russia and Israel. We see him as teacher and scholar; as husband and lover; as a writer of profoundly influential critical works; as both observer of and participant in the cultural history of his time. Marvelous scenes of close-up encounters with literary figures abound. The young Kazin, “summoned” to discuss his just-published first book, pays his first visit to the great Edmund Wilson (he was “merely impatient with my book”) and his wife (“she went into my faults with great care…she looked beautiful in the increasing crispness of her analysis”) Mary McCarthy. We see Lionel Trilling (“for Trilling I would always be ‘too Jewish’”); Saul Bellow, soon after Augie March, already projecting a “sense of destiny as a novelist that excited everyone around him”; Sylvia Plath as a student of Kazin’s at Smith. Kazin shares the particular joy of being in the company of Hannah Arendt—Hannah at work, “brimming over with enthusiasm for the New World,” and in the Morningside Drive apartment where she and her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, lived “thought dominated” lives, and were magnets for young writers. We see old and young contemporaries—Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, T. S. Eliot, and others—freely expressing (and being) themselves. Every image and incident is filtered through Kazin’s own strong sensibility—powerfully informed by his Russian immigrant-socialist background, by the resurgent sense of his own Jewishness, and by the “raw power, mass, and volume” of the city he is unfailingly drawn to. New York is itself a central character in his book as in his life—a life superbly told, in a book that will be of fascination to everyone interested in American writing and writers.

The #1 New York Times bestseller that traces the rise of the Guggenheims, the Goldmans, and other families from immigrant poverty to social prominence. They immigrated to America from Germany in the nineteenth century with names like Loeb, Sachs, Seligman, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. From tenements on the Lower East Side to Park Avenue mansions, this handful of Jewish families turned small businesses into imposing enterprises and amassed spectacular fortunes. But despite possessing breathtaking wealth that rivaled the Astors and Rockefellers, they were barred by the gentile establishment from the lofty realm of “the 400,” a register of New York’s most elite, because of their religion and humble backgrounds. In response, they created their own elite “100,” a privileged society as opulent and exclusive as the one that had refused them entry. “Our Crowd” is the fascinating story of this rarefied society. Based on letters, documents, diary entries, and intimate personal remembrances of family lore by members of these most illustrious clans, it is an engrossing portrait of upper-class Jewish life over two centuries; a riveting story of the bankers, brokers, financiers, philanthropists, and business tycoons who started with nothing and turned their family names into American institutions.