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Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York
In the middle of the twentieth century, good cameras became smaller and lighter, enabling street photographers to roam alleyways, ride elevated trains and subways, and stroll beaches in summertime to capture daily life with urgency and intimacy. Walkers in the City showcases the distinctive urban vision that working-class Jewish photographers produced with these new cameras on New York City's streets and in public spaces. Drawing on the experiences of and photographs by a generation of young Jewish photographers who belonged to the New York Photo League, Deborah Dash Moore offers a new perspective on New York as seen through their eyes―a cityscape of working-class people and democratizing public transit. With their cameras, they pictured Gotham's abrasive social milieu and its evanescent textures and light, creating an archive of vernacular images of city life and a distinctive tradition of street photography that would be widely imitated. Walkers in the City documents how these roving, imaginative New Yorkers, entranced by the medium of photography, transformed everyday sights into rousing, joyous, and poignant moments of time, creating visual poetry out of the fabric of social life.
- GenresPhotographyHistory
304 pages, Hardcover
Published September 15, 2023
About the author
Deborah Dash Moore
29 books7 followersDeborah Dash Moore (born 1946, in New York City) is the former Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Moore taught for many years at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. While there she served intermittently as head of Religious Studies and helped found a program in Jewish Studies. At Vassar, Deborah Dash Moore wrote and co-edited numerous books, articles and collections. She was a highly regarded educator and classroom professor in addition to her scholarship.
Her first book, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (1981), explores how the children of immigrants created an ethnic world that blended elements of Jewish and American culture into a vibrant urban society. To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L. A. (1994) follows those big city Jews who chose to move to new homes after World War II and examines the type of communities and politics that flourished in these rapidly growing centers.
Issues of leadership, authority and accomplishment have also engaged her attention, first in B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (1981), and more recently in the award-winning two-volume Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997), which she edited with Paula Hyman.
Her 2004 book, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands, simultaneously wrestling with what it meant to be an American and a Jew. GI Jews, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, is a powerful, intimate portrayal of the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual.
In 2008, Moore published American Jewish Identity Politics (University of Michigan), a collection of essays by such notable Jewish studies scholars as Hasia Diner, Jonathan Sarna, and Paula Hyman.
In 2011, her book Gender & Jewish History (Indiana University Press), written with co-editor Marion Kaplan in honor of historian Paula Hyman, was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Anthologies and Collections.
In September 2012, NYU Press published a three-volume series edited by Moore, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York. This history was selected for the National Jewish Book Award.
Moore taught for many years at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. While there she served intermittently as head of Religious Studies and helped found a program in Jewish Studies. At Vassar, Deborah Dash Moore wrote and co-edited numerous books, articles and collections. She was a highly regarded educator and classroom professor in addition to her scholarship.
Her first book, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (1981), explores how the children of immigrants created an ethnic world that blended elements of Jewish and American culture into a vibrant urban society. To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L. A. (1994) follows those big city Jews who chose to move to new homes after World War II and examines the type of communities and politics that flourished in these rapidly growing centers.
Issues of leadership, authority and accomplishment have also engaged her attention, first in B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (1981), and more recently in the award-winning two-volume Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997), which she edited with Paula Hyman.
Her 2004 book, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands, simultaneously wrestling with what it meant to be an American and a Jew. GI Jews, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, is a powerful, intimate portrayal of the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual.
In 2008, Moore published American Jewish Identity Politics (University of Michigan), a collection of essays by such notable Jewish studies scholars as Hasia Diner, Jonathan Sarna, and Paula Hyman.
In 2011, her book Gender & Jewish History (Indiana University Press), written with co-editor Marion Kaplan in honor of historian Paula Hyman, was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Anthologies and Collections.
In September 2012, NYU Press published a three-volume series edited by Moore, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York. This history was selected for the National Jewish Book Award.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 3, 2023
This is a really wonderfully written ode to New York City by the incomparable Deborah Dash Moore. Anyone who is interested in photography, New York City, the Postwar era in urban environments, or Jewish culture would do well to get a copy of this book. The publishers also did a fantastic job and the images are great to look through.
November 4, 2023
Utterly absorbing and beautiful book. Made me want to grill my grandfather about his experiences growing up in the neighborhood of Coney Island. Would make an incredible gift.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews