“The New York Jew” is an enduring American archetype that comes in many guises: as the secular cosmopolitan with decidedly left-wing political tastes, as the slick manipulator of markets against whom anti-Semitic populists vent their rage, as the lovable embodiment of a self-deprecatory sense of humor and a world-weary sensibility. Of course, the fact that there are so many different kinds of “New York Jew” suggests the actual, living, breathing creature defies easy caricature. In the assessment of historian Jeffrey Gurock, most recently the author of the final volume in a new set on Jewish life in Gotham, City of Promises, there always has been “a multiplicity of New York Jewish stories…neighborhood by neighborhood, borough by borough.”
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