In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles--both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women's lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women's studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives.

In Bare-Knuckle Negotiation , Felder shares his wit and wisdom about the tactics and strategies of effective negotiation, so laypeople can get what they want when it’s time to cut a deal. He covers diverse topics from how to read opponents’ nonverbal cues to unnerving your opponent through displays of seemingly irrational behavior. He reveals the importance of never making a threat you can’t back up and how to be crafty without being dishonest. Citing anecdotes, cases, and stories from his long career in the legal trenches—tales that are often outrageous, shocking, and strange—Felder lets you in on the secrets that have made him such a feared and respected negotiator.

A humorous memoir of big city angst and big life decisions chronicles one couple's journey from a Manhattan townhouse to an eighteenth-century Dutchess County farmhouse.

"The facts and legends of New York's famed artistic hub told by one of its key participants"--

Using himself as the persona, the author interviews the police commissioner concerning racism and a SoHo dealer on art, invades Brooklyn Mafia dens and a Times Square sex palace, and explores a shelter for the homeless

In 1955 a New York City court sentenced Puerto Rican immigrant and teenage gang member Frank Santana to twenty-five years to life for second-degree murder. Fredric Wertham (1895-1981), one of the most influential authorities on child psychology in the twentieth century, was outraged and felt compelled to write The Circle of Guilt . He had conducted multiple interviews with Santana and created an extensive psychological profile on him. Wertham saw unsettling patterns in the ways in which the case was reported, investigated, and deliberated. Media portrayed the victim, a white teenager named Bill Blankenship, as a "model boy" and reported the killing as "unprovoked." In the furor surrounding the case, Santana was often called a "hoodlum." Wertham suspected otherwise. In The Circle of Guilt , the psychiatrist uncovers a paradigm of fear, racism, distrust, and prejudice. He argues that the press's presentation of the case reflected extreme cultural bigotry. Wertham also reveals Blankenship's activity within teen gangs and asserts that Santana's actions were shaped in part by his unmediated exposure to mass media. This reprinted edition includes a new introduction by history professor William Bush that places both the crime and Wertham's work into cultural and historical context. Bush argues that much of what Wertham decries in mass media and its impact on justice and race applies equally today. Longtime chief of psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, Fredric Wertham authored Seduction of the Innocent . William Bush is visiting assistant professor of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Offering a glimpse inside the high-stakes world of real estate development, from finding a property to securing financing to hiring an architect to constructing the building to seeing it profitably occupied, this is a history of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, from one of the people most responsible for its changing cityscape. In 1986, the New York Times called William Zeckendorf Jr. Manhattan's most active real-estate developer, a judgement borne out by Zeckendorf's fascinating memoir. The second generation of a legendary family of developers, Bill Zeckendorf was a developer with a social conscience, not only putting up buildings but opening neglected parts of the city and transforming whole communities. Among the projects Zeckendorf chronicles in detail - and with rich documentary illustrations - are the Columbia, which set off a building boom on the Upper West Side; the four-acre Worldwide Plaza, a landmark in West Midtown; Queens West, the first residential project on the waterfront in Queens; the enormous Ronald Reagan Office Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.; and numerous projects in Santa Fe, his beloved second home.

How does a Jewish boy who spent the bulk of his childhood on the basketball courts of Brooklyn wind up teaching in one of the city's pioneering black studies departments? Naison's odyssey begins as Brooklyn public schools respond to a new wave of Black migrants and Caribbean immigrants, and established residents flee to virtually all-white parts of the city or suburbs. Already alienated by his parents' stance on race issues and their ambitions for him, he has started on a separate ideological path by the time he enters Columbia College. Once he embarks on a long-term interracial relationship, becomes a member of SDS, focuses his historical work on black activists, and organizes community groups in the Bronx, his immersion in the radical politics of the 1960s has emerged as the center of his life. Determined to keep his ties to the Black community, even when the New Left splits along racial lines, Naison joined the fledgling African American studies program at Fordham, remarkable then as now for its commitment to interracial education.This memoir offers more than a participant's account of the New Left's racial dynamics; it eloquently speaks to the ways in which political commitments emerge from and are infused with the personal choices we all make.

The untold life story of All-of-a-Kind Family author Sydney Taylor, highlighting her dramatic influence on American children's literature.

The son of the founder of public relations reflects on his unusual life in his father's shadow, chronicling his defiant youth, his escapades with beautiful women and the CIA, and his battle with multiple sclerosis

"During his 50-year association with the Village Voice, Fred W. McDarrah (1926-2007) covered the city's downtown scenes, producing an unmatched and encyclopedic visual record of people, movements, and events. McDarrah frequented the bars, cafés, and galleries where writers, artists, and musicians gathered, and he was welcome in the apartments and lofts of the city's avant-garde cultural aristocracy. He captured every vital moment, from Jack Kerouac reading poetry, to Bob Dylan hanging out in Sheridan Square, to Andy Warhol filming in the Factory, to the Stonewall Riots. Through his lens, we see the legendary birth of ideas and attitudes that continue to shape the character and allure of New York today." -- Publisher's description

(Applause Books). "The best way I know to resuscitate the theatre is to produce dangerous new works." Stuart Ostrow. Producer Stuart Ostrow's manifesto of how intelligent life might be restored to the theatre is also a unique personal memoir of the producer-creator relationship and an evaluation of the essentials that can make a show fly, or remain earthbound. As a solo producer, Ostrow's many productions include M. Butterfly , which won the Tony Award for Best Play; Pippin ; and 1776 , which received both the New York and London Drama Critics Awards as well as the Tony Award for Best Musical. He produced the original Broadway production of the critically acclaimed La Bete , which won the Olivier Award in London for Best Comedy. Ostrow was brought in to fix the original production of Chicago , collaborated with Anthony Hopkins on a London production of M. Butterfly , that was not meant to be, and even had his own play, Stages , directed on Broadway by the avant-garde theatrical pioneer Richard Foreman. He riffs about the heroes and heels he's met along the way and that great cast includes Frank Loesser, Meredith Willson, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Bob Fosse, David Geffen, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Henry Hwang, John Kander, Fred Ebb, and many more.

It is 1955, and Colette Rossant, newly married, has just arrived in America with her husband Jimmy. She is bemused by American customs and most importantly by the food: the ubiquitous mayonnaise, the iceberg lettuce. But post-war New York is humming and they discover a whole new world in Greenwich Village; Colette slowly falls in love with her adopted country. When Jimmy and Colette buy a house downtown, Colette finds a place she can truly call home. It is in this house that they raise their four children and where Colette progresses from being a passionate cook to an acclaimed food writer. Madeleines in Manhattan is the story of her journey from young housewife to successful professional.

Every city and every state needs a Richard Ravitch. In sixty years on the job, whether working in business or government, he was the man willing to tackle some of the most complex challenges facing New York. Trained as a lawyer, he worked briefly for the House of Representatives, then began his career in his family's construction business. He built high-profile projects like the Whitney Museum and Citicorp Center but his primary energy was devoted to building over 40,000 units of affordable housing including the first racially integrated apartment complex in Washington, D.C. He dealt with architects, engineers, lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, union leaders, construction workers, bankers, and tenants—virtually all of the people who make cities and states work. It was no surprise that those endeavors ultimately led to a life of public service. In 1975, Ravitch was asked by then New York Governor Hugh Carey to arrange a rescue of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, a public entity that had issued bonds to finance over 30,000 affordable housing units but was on the verge of bankruptcy. That same year, Ravitch was at Carey's side when New York City's biggest banks said they would no longer underwrite its debt and he became instrumental to averting the city's bankruptcy. Throughout his career, Ravitch divided his time between public service and private enterprise. He was chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from 1979 to 1983 and is generally credited with rebuilding the system. He turned around the Bowery Savings Bank, chaired a commission that rewrote the Charter of the City of New York, served on two Presidential Commissions, and became chief labor negotiator for Major League Baseball. Then, in 2008, after Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal and New York State was in a post-financial-crisis meltdown, Spitzer's successor, David Paterson, appointed Ravitch Lieutenant Governor and asked him to make recommendations regarding the state's budgeting plan. What Ravitch found was the result of not just the economic downturn but years of fiscal denial. And the closer he looked, the clearer it became that the same thing was happening in most states. Budgetary pressures from Medicaid, pension promises to public employees, and deceptive budgeting and borrowing practices are crippling our states' ability to do what only they can do—invest in the physical and human infrastructure the country needs to thrive. Making this case is Ravitch's current public endeavor and it deserves immediate attention from both public officials and private citizens.

As cofounder of the internationally-known, highly-controversial radical political troupe, The Living Theater, author Judith Malina is one of the leading female countercultural figures of the 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. In Full moon stages: personal notes from 50 years of The Living Theatre, she creates an intimate memoir in a unique format with a collection of personal notes written on every full moon for 50 years from 1964 to 2014. These never-before-published entries reveal Malina's most private thoughts and inform the reader on what The Living Theatre was performing as they wound their way from New York City to Italy, France, Belgium, Germany and Brazil in a nomadic series of notable performances of such underground classics as The Brig, The Connection, and Paradise Now. Malina is relentless in her commitment to the full moon schedule, writing regardless of her current life circumstance. Notes issue forth from hotels, trains--even prison, offering a light on the consequences of holding true to her code of the theatrical expression of her pacifist-anarchist principles.