In 1960, Fortune magazine published an article that trumpeted the 'Jewish élan' of New York City, and credited the Jewish community with contributing 'mightily to the citys dramatic character its excitement, its originality, its stridency, its unexpectedness.' In his exhaustive history of Jews in New York from 1920 to the present, Gurock covers the wax and wane of immigration, segregation, suburban flight, anti-Semitism, socialist conviction and Zionism. In the 1920s, Jews continued to settle in clusters, mostly on the Lower East Side and in socialist cooperative housing in the Bronx. From there, Gurock sketches a map of the Jewish communitys sprawl: Orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe across Brooklyn, Sephardim in Flatbush and Bensonhurst, German Jews in Washington Heights and Yorkville, and an increasingly affluent mix on the West Side of Manhattan and in Jackson Heights and Forest Hills, Queens. After World War II, Hasidic sects established themselves in Williamsburg and Crown Heights, in a concentration that homogenized previous divisions. Groups that 'had once sprawled from Bratislava to Odessa were now located a few streets from one another.' Many areas suffered from poverty and crime, which increased racial tensions, and in 1964, race riots broke out. Anecdotes embroider and occasionally deepen his broad sweep: Leonard Bernsteins 'West Side Story,' for example, was initially about Italian Catholics and Jews (he later replaced the Jewish family with a Puerto Rican one).

Jeffrey S. Gurock is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University. He has written or edited 25 books, including Jews in Gotham, which in 2012 was honored as Winner, Everett Family Foundation Award, Jewish Book of the Year, Jewish Book Council.