New York City in the 1970s was the setting for Taxi Driver , Annie Hall , and Saturday Night Fever , the nightmare playground for Son of Sam and The Warriors , the proving grounds for graffiti, punk, hip-hop, and all manner of other public spectacle. Musicians, artists, and writers could subsist even in Manhattan, while immigrants from the world over were reinventing the city in their own image. Others, fed up with crime, filth and frustration, simply split. Fast-forward three decades and today New York can appear a glamorous metropolis, with real estate prices soaring higher than its skyscrapers. But is this fresh-scrubbed, affluent city really an improvement on its grittier--and more affordable--predecessor? Taking us back to the streets where eccentricity and anomie were pervasive, New York Calling unlocks life in the unpolished Apple, where, it seemed, anything could happen. All five boroughs­­--the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island--comprising hundreds of neighborhoods and the interlaced worlds of politics, crime, drugs, sex, and mischief, are explored with a love of the city unclouded by romance yet undimmed by cynicism. Acclaimed historian Marshall Berman and journalist Brian Berger gather here a stellar group of writers and photographers who combine their energies to weave a rich tale of struggle, excitement, and wonder. John Strausbaugh explains how Uptown has taken over Downtown, as Tom Robbins examines the mayors and would-be mayors who have presided over the transformation. Margaret Morton chronicles the homeless, while Robert Atkins offers a personal view of the city's gay culture and the devastating impact of aids. Anthony Haden-Guest and John Yau offer insiders' views of the New York art world, while Brandon Stosuy and Allen Lowe recount their discoveries of the local rock and jazz scenes. Armond White and Leonard Greene approach African-American culture and civil rights from perspectives often marginalized in so-called polite conversation. Daily life in New York has its dramatic moments too. Luc Sante gives us glimpses of a city perpetually on the grift, Jean Thilmany and Philip Dray share secrets of Gotham's ethnic enclaves, Richard Meltzer walks, Jim Knipfel rides the subways, and Robert Sietsema criss-crosses the city, indefatigably tasting everything from giant Nigerian tree snails to Fujianese turtles. It's a long way from old Brooklyn to the new Times Square. But New York Calling reminds us of what has changed--and what's been lost --along the way.

Jewish women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived with a sense of painful connection to a culture that rejected their aspirations. Raised in a Jewish environment wary of female aspirations and in a wider world that was only marginally more sympathetic to their ambitions, this diverse group often found that a life devoted to literary expression required sacrifices and painful choices. Writing, however, enabled them to reclaim and explore their Jewish heritage. Responding to a variety of Jewish women's voices in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and Spanish, this collection of seventeen essays surveys the achievements of Jewish women writers from the Middle Ages to the present. Scholars of Jewish literature chronicle the Jewish encounter with modernity and document female strategies for constructing intellectual and emotional identities amidst the competing demands of traditional norms, familial obligations, and economic survival. The themes of repression and equivocal liberation resonate throughout, as the authors reflect on the silencing of the female voice in a traditional Jewish culture that most often denied women the education and the empowerment requisite for recording their thoughts and feelings. While individual essays reveal literary discoveries of self and forgings of identity by women rising to the opportunities and challenges of drastically altered Jewish social realities, a significant number also show the sad decline of women writers upon whom silence was reimposed. Several chapters consider how Jewish women were depicted by male writers from the Middle Ages through the mid-nineteenth century. A final essay documents the ways in which memory, testimony, and survival affect the writing of women who survived the Holocaust, a perspective frequently marginalized in studies of Holocaust literature. Women of the Word is part of an emerging effort to listen to the voices of Jewish women both past and present. Written in a period when Jewish women writers internationally are creating a wealth of diverse literary works, these essays take note of the short time during which Jewish women's writing has flourished and inspire readers with the richness of the literature that such writers have already produced.