The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City

A history of New York's Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present.

Finalist for the 2025 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Regional category

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 Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project-tells the story in over a baker's dozen 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. Containing fifty images, many of which have never before been published, the book is complemented by an online interactive Google Map linked to over one hundred of the historic locations discussed in the book, with additional graphics and resource materials. 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.