The Jews of Harlem: Rise, Decline & Revival

In this lecture, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, recalls Jewish Harlem, a neighborhood that was once home to the second largest Jewish community in America. Using periodicals, memoirs, interviews and genealogical materials, Professor Gurock will describe the forces that brought several generations of Jews to settle there, as well as its subsequent decline in the 1920s and reemergence in the 21st-century.

A life-long New Yorker with family roots in Harlem dating back more than a century, Jeffrey S. Gurock is the author or editor of eighteen books, including the recent The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline, and Revival of a Jewish Community, and over 100 scholarly articles. In 2013 his Jews of Gotham won the National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council. He also received national recognition for his work, A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community; Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy and American Judaism, which won the Saul Viener Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society. A leader among American Jewish historians, he served for 20 years as an editor of American Jewish History. Twice the chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society, he is also a Fellow of the New York Academy of History.