The Bronx’s landlords were mostly small-time capitalists, often Jewish and sometimes Italian American, with roots in the borough’s pre–World War II working class. Many were also absentee ...

In 1930, the Bronx was 50 percent Jewish. It’s a statistic that always surprises me, partly because the intense Jewish nostalgia over the Lower East Side and Brooklyn overshadows the Bronx, and partly ...

Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don’t, and we just pretend that they did. When eighteenth-century Parisians clamored for bread, did Marie Antoinette respond, “Let them ...

My sister, Lynn, and I always knew that our father grew up first in East New York and then in Flatbush, pure Brooklyn in every way, including his accent. (How much I’d give to be able to hear that ...

We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. In "Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough" (‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux), New Yorker writer ...