From Venice to Harlem

From Venice to Harlem

Jonathan Karp

Faced with a bewildering variety of uses for the word “ghetto,” Daniel B. Schwartz performs marvels of clarification in steering the reader through the labyrinthian twists, turns, and hidden alleyways that mark this terminological odyssey.

Jews Not without Money

Jews Not without Money

Jonathan Karp

Jews, Money, Myth, at London's Jewish Museum, normalizes the Jewish relationship with money without negating those factors that made this particular historical association especially fraught.

Workday Jews

Workday Jews

Jonathan Karp

In their respective books, Chad Alan Goldberg and Eliyahu Stern address the question of whether the Jews are the quintessentially modern people or a people who came to modernity late and with a sudden shock. They reach very different conclusions.

Joseph the Righteous

Joseph the Righteous

Jonathan Karp

But on the very night in 1737 that Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s patron suddenly passed away, he, “his servants, and many other court officials were arrested, and soon a special inquisition committee was convened in order to investigate the court Jew’s ‘atrocious crimes.’”

The Hit Man

Jonathan Karp

What music businessman Morris Levy craved even more than the recording artists themselves were the copyrights and catalogues the labels contained. “Copyrights don’t talk back,” he liked to say.