The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City by Henry Sapoznik
Edited by Alan Singer
Henry Sapoznik is a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR’s Yiddish Radio Project, a five-time Grammy-nominated producer and performer, and the author of Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World. The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY PRESS, 2025) is a history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. In twenty-three chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Blacks and Jews, restaurants, real estate, and journalism, it retells the story of Jews in New York City by focusing on Yiddish, a Germn dialect that was the language of Ashkenazy Jewish immigrants, and the center of their culture. Sapoznik’s research draws on Yiddish and English language newspapers from the period and previously inaccessible materials to offer fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. The book includes fifty images and is linked to an online interactive Google Map with over one hundred sites discussed in the book.
