Attention Surplus

The mass migration from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the slums of New York uprooted centuries-old patterns of Jewish life, so it's only natural that Jewish culture also underwent a massive shift. As young Jews left the tight-knit communities of the shtetls behind for the great big world of the cities, Orthodox Judaism faded away and secular Yiddish culture blossomed. As Jews confronted the harsh realities of industrial capitalism in New York, socialism replaced religion as the great hope to end the suffering of the Jewish people. In this episode, I'll explore the vibrant cultural, political, and intellectual life of the Lower East Side as it became the center of America's socialist movement. I'll take you into the shoes of the garment workers, often teenage girls who didn't speak a word of English, as they put this theory into practice and stood up for their dignity as working women.

For centuries, the majority of the world's Jews had lived in small towns called shtetls in the countryside of Eastern Europe. These were isolated, tight-knit communities where the Torah reigned supreme. By the late 19th century, dissatisfaction had been growing among younger Jews about the poverty, the antisemitism, the lack of opporunity, and the narrow-mindedness of the shtetls. Then, in 1881, a series of violent pogroms broke out in Ukraine, forcing thousands of Jews to flee first to major cities nearby and then to America. This exodus only picked up steam in the coming decades as the long-simmering desire to leave the shtetls boiled over. In total, more than three million Jews fled Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914, and the bulk of them ended up in New York City. Here, they were crammed into tiny tenements where they worked long hours sewing garments to stay alive. In this episode, I'll attempt to humanize this story by giving a detailed account of what the journey to America, and the new lives the immigrants established there, were like.

This is part one of a series about the incredibly multifacted history of Jewish immigration to NYC, each episode focusing on a different facet. In this episode, I talk about the oldest and most successful part of America's Jewish population: German Jews who immigrated in the mid-19th century. Join me as I follow these immigrants from the ghettos of Germany to the tenements of Little Germany to the luxurious apartments of the Upper West Side.

By the turn of the 20th century, the New York Irish still formed a clear underclass, but they started to have a few things going for them: their power in Tammany Hall, their dominance of the skilled building trades, and their social advantage over the Italian, Jewish, and especially African-American migrants who had began pouring into the city. In the final episode of this four-part series, I talk about how they used these advantages to climb out of poverty and escape the slums. I'll also talk about the underappreciated later waves of Irish immigration and the cultural life of working-class Irish New York during its mid-20th-century heyday.

In this episode, I discuss the impact the Irish had on the politics of NYC, their role in the Civil War, and why, in 1863, they carried out the worst race riot in our country's history.

In part two of my four-part series on the history of Irish New York, I talk in detail about the Great Hunger, the journey of the million people who fled it, and the lives they then established in New York City.

Since the 18th century, around four million people have immigrated from Ireland to New York City. At one point, around half of all the city's residents were Irish, giving it a larger Irish population than any other city in the world. The housing these immigrants lived in was shabby, the jobs they worked were awful, and mainstream American society wasn't particularly fond of them. Fast forward 150 years, and the descendants of these impoverished famine refugees mostly live comfortable lives in the suburbs and are more or less indistinguishable from any other white Americans. In this four-part series, we'll take a look at how and why the Irish came to NYC in such huge numbers, what this journey was like, and how it permanatly changed the course of New York City's history.

When we think of American slavery, New York is hardly the first place that comes to mind. But there was a time when nearly half of white families in NYC owned another human being--more than any other city in the Thirteen Colonies with the exception of Charleston, South Carolina. Not only did it rely on enslaved people for manual labor, New York was also a city built on the Triangle Trade. It grew rich largely thanks to its economic ties with the brutal sugar plantation economies of the West Indies. In the 19th century, was replaced with an even more profitable connection to the American South. So when the nation became divided over slavery in the 1850s, NYC fell firmly on the side of the Southern cotton planters. In this episode, we'll talk about the myriad ways in which chattel slavery played a crucial role in creating the city we know and love today.