Wonderful Town

Author of a small, but jam-packed, book tells the story of Jewish

New York through vintage photographs and memorabilia.

JEWISH NEW YORK

Not.11.3.1e Neight lo hoods suid MerriorableMomenrs'

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Above:
The author portrays New
York's Jewish
community as diverse and
vital, its history complex.

Right:
Nathan's Hot Dog
Emporium at Coney
Island, August 1954

94

01-

About 70 percent of all Jews in America can trace their origins to New
York City, says author Ira Wolfinan.

SANDEE BRAWARSKY

book, Jewish New York: Notable Jewish

Special to the Jewish News

Neighborhoods and Memorable Moments (Rizzoli;
$22.50), with its scene of pushcarts and crowds of
shoppers on Essex and Hester streets, 100 years
ago. Although small in format, the book informa-
tively chronicles — in words and vintage photo-
graphs, portraits, paintings, souvenirs, postcards,
maps and memorabilia — the community's jour-
ney from Essex Street to Broadway, as well as its
very beginnings at the tip of Manhattan, then
New Amsterdam, in 1654.

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12/12

2003

88

n the early morning of the eve of Yom
Kippur, a line of 250 people stretched from
the not-yet-open door of Zabar's down
Broadway and across 80th Street to West End
Avenue in Manhattan. Author Ira Wolfman
described the scene, with people kibitzing in a famil-
iar way, as unremarkable yet ever so Jewish: a mix of
the secular and the religious and showing the ease
and comfort of New York City's Jews.
As he spoke, I thought of the cover of his new

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WONDERFUL TOWN on page 90