The Big (Jewish) Apple City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York Edited by Deborah Dash Moore NYU Press 2012,  $99.00, pp. 1108 (3 volumes) Brownsville, where I grew up in the 1950s, was an Americanized shtetl. Nobody feared pogroms, but the wounds of the war in Europe were still raw—more recent then than 9/11 is today—and every Jew knew that beyond the neighborhood’s porous borders we were regarded as somehow different. In 1953 that difference was brought home when the funeral cortege bearing the bodies of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg passed our block. How could Jews have betrayed America? Alternatively, how could America have blamed the loss of our nuclear monopoly on the Jews? Later that year, though, as if the execution had finally put a protracted embarrassment to rest, something happened even closer to home—in our living...

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