Jonathan Goldman with Jennifer Baum

Join us Thursday, June 4th at 7pm to celebrate the release of Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York: From the Suppressed to the Strange with the author, Jonathan Ezra Goldman, and Jennifer Baum, author of Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right. 

In order to facilitate this in-person author event, we will be partially closing the second floor starting at 6:00pm. Please review our Safety guidelines and register for the event using the link below. 

https://forms.gle/5MvF23S65WZ1nKri9

About Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York:

Offers a panoramic view of New York City in the 1920s, uncovering hidden histories from within entertainment, politics, arts, technology, and the law.

Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. In sections that intertwine entertainment, politics, art, technology, crime, shopping, eating, and recreation, the book portrays sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform through anecdotes of individual experiences that counter the era's popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. Jonathan Ezra Goldman's whirlwind tour of early 1920s New York City visits an all-female police platoon, a Black amusement park shut down before it opened, an Arabic literary salon, socialist Puerto Rican cigar factories, Chinatown funerals, lesbian cafes, overcrowded jails, toxic dumps, and Ku Klux Klan recruitment offices. The grand narratives of the 1920s interweave with little-known anecdotes about well-known figures such as Marcus Garvey, Dorothy Parker, and Babe Ruth, serving as a backdrop to the everyday challenges and triumphs of a city beset by crowds, automobile traffic, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased stories of injustices like Jim Crow practices, immigration anxieties, and the violent treatment of political dissent. These stories still resonate today, showing that this dizzying, exuberant ride through hidden history can help twenty-first readers see our own moment more clearly.

Jonathan Ezra Goldman (he/him) is Professor in the Department of Humanities, New York Institute of Technology. His previous books include Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity and Joyce and the Law; he is director of the digital project NY1920s: 100 Years Ago Today, When We Became Modern. A specialist in twentieth-century literature and its popular culture and legal contexts, Goldman brings scholarly depth and a storyteller’s instinct to the hidden narratives of America’s most iconic city during its most iconic decade in Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York from the Suppressed to the Strange.

Jennifer Baum is a filmmaker turned writer. Her writing has been published in New York Daily News, Guernica, Jacobin, Lilith, The Village Voice, The Phoenix Jewish News, Canadian Jewish Outlook, The Jewish Observer Los Angeles, MUTHA, Hip Mama, and NewFound, which nominated her essay, A Different Set of Rules, for a Pushcart award. Her full-length memoir, Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right was published by Fordham University Press in spring 2024. Baum teaches composition at Montclair State University.