The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City

by Henry H. Sapoznik

Overview

The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of New York’s history of Yiddish popular culture. Henry H. Sapoznik—a five-time Grammy-nominated performer/producer and Peabody Award–winning co-producer of NPR’s Yiddish Radio Project—tells the story in chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Blacks and Jews, restaurants, real estate, and journalism. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the impossible-to-overstate influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is a vivid, entertaining, and accessible compendium of both New York’s lush Ashkenazic past and present, showcasing the culture’s persistent resiliency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798228704053
Publisher:	Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:	11/18/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Henry H. Sapoznik is the Peabody Award–winning co-producer of the 2002 NPR series The Yiddish Radio Project, a five-time Grammy-nominated producer/performer of over fifty recordings, and author of the award-winning book Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1. Essen! Eating!

1. Kashrus: The Quest for Kosher

2. Trotzky's Kosher Restaurant

3. The Jewish Delicatessen: "The Stronghold of Pungent Meat"

4. Of Knishes and Kishkes

5. Joseph Moskowitz and Romanian Restaurants

6. Yiddish Champagne: Seltzer and Dr. Brown's Celery Tonic

7. From Adjective to Noun: The Appetizing Store

8. "Eat in Good Health!": Dairy and Vegetarian Restaurants

9. Fast, Crowded, and Cheap: The Cafeteria

10. Raisins and Almonds: Chunky Milk Chocolate

Part 2. Architecture

11. The Rise and Fall of the House of Jarmulowsky

12. The Forverts Building: From Socialist to Socialite

13. Harrison G. Wiseman: Builder of New York Yiddish Theaters

14. Hotel Herzl: Max Bernstein and the Libby's Hotel and Baths

Part 3. Music

15. "To Hear...": The First Yiddish Records

16. The First Yiddish Recording Artists

17. Jews and Jazz: From Before the Beginning

18. Sam Ash and Shimele Blank: Two Music Stores

19. Khazntes: Women Cantors of the Stage

20. Thomas LaRue Jones, Goldye Mae Sellers and the Lost World of Black Cantors

Part 4. Theater

21. Yente Telebende: The Woman with the Wallop

22. Uncle Thomashefsky's Cabin: The 1900s Yiddish Uncle Tom Shows

23. Before Jolson: The Jazz Singer, Jessel, and the Jews

Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Editorial Reviews

This you should read! From knishes to khazones, the Forvert to Cel-Ray, and forgotten cultural triumphs and nadirs, you couldn’t find a better guide to New York’s Yiddish heritage than The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City. Anyone interested in New York City needs a copy of this book!”

Nancy Groce

With The Tourist’s Guide, Henry Sapoznik conjures a yiddishe ghost-New York in a book that will make awestruck tourists even out of seen-it-all city natives. Though many of the book’s locales are described, sadly, as razed and replaced, Sapoznik brings them so vividly to life that, if you look out of the corner of your eye, you might even see Yonah Schimmel himself racing to deliver a platter of knishes.”

author of Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Os Danny Fingeroth

Henry Sapoznik has broken new ground again. He has a knack for endowing the ephemeral with longevity by treating each ticket, advertisement, poster, theater program, menu, photograph, or recording as a piece of a puzzle of a lost Yiddish New York that only he could envision. The result is a deeply researched, engaging, and richly illustrated account of a world lost and found. A fascinating book and must-read!”

Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibit Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

"This book is filled with deep original research leavened by lively writing and good humor. Anyone with an interest in New York City or Yiddish language and culture will read it with pleasure." — Open Letters Review

"…[a] superb new book … Sapoznik writes about something that’s irretrievably lost, which is why it feels like a yizkor book. Lost Yiddish New York City is one of a newly-developing (and long overdue) genre of books about vernacular Jewish culture, focusing on how ordinary people lived." — Forward

"Henry Sapoznik has broken new ground again. He has a knack for endowing the ephemeral with longevity by treating each ticket, advertisement, poster, theater program, menu, photograph, or recording as a piece of a puzzle of a lost Yiddish New York that only he could envision. The result is a deeply researched, engaging, and richly illustrated account of a world lost and found. A fascinating book and must read!" — Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and University Professor Emerita at New York University

"This you should read! From knishes to khazones, the Forvert to Cel-Ray, and forgotten cultural triumphs and nadirs, you couldn't find a better guide to New York's Yiddish heritage than The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City. Anyone interested in New York City needs a copy of this book!" — Nancy Groce, Folklorist, American Folklife Center

"With The Tourist's Guide, Henry Sapoznik conjures a yiddishe ghost-New York in a book that will make awestruck tourists even out of seen-it-all city natives. Though many of the book's locales are described, sadly, as razed and replaced, Sapoznik brings them so vividly to life that, if you look out of the corner of your eye, you might even see Yonah Schimmel himself racing to deliver a platter of knishes." —Danny Fingeroth, author of Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald's Assassin

From the Publisher