Rabbis and Gangsters PDF Download

Author: Phil Graubart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781550962987
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Yael Gold is in love with her boss, Rabbi Judah Loeb, but when the rabbi's wife is found murdered, Yael goes from love-addled naïf to panicky murder suspect overnight. Set in a desert suburb in the Southwest, this brilliant, tense murder mystery keeps readers constantly guessing "whodunit." Was it Yael's husband, an insecure Klezmer musician with a savant's gift for musical trivia or one of Judah Loeb's many mistresses? Or is the culprit the ethically-challenged senior rabbi whose "open marriage" scandal rocks his desert community--or is it the mysterious former mafia hitman known only as "The Scumbag?" With humor and suspense it follows Yael through the shocking murder as her troubled past--a philandering rabbi father, her Cuban gangster relatives, and scarring childhood abuse--provides scope to her difficult but triumphant journey to becoming a spiritual leader.

Author: Joe Kraus
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501747339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago's Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Author Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin "Zuckie the Bookie" Zuckerman, last of the independent West Side Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head of the Syndicate's "Jewish wing." These two men linked the early Jewish gangsters of the neighborhoods of Maxwell Street and Lawndale to the notorious Chicago Outfit that emerged from Al Capone's criminal confederation. Focusing on the murder of Zuckerman by Patrick, Kraus introduces us to the different models of organized crime they represented, a raft of largely forgotten Jewish gangsters, and the changing nature of Chicago's political corruption. Hard-to-believe anecdotes of corrupt politicians, seasoned killers, and in-over-their-heads criminal operators spotlight the magnitude and importance of Jewish gangsters to the story of Windy City mob rule. With an eye for the dramatic, The Kosher Capones takes us deep inside a hidden society and offers glimpses of the men who ran the Jewish criminal community in Chicago for more than sixty years.

Author: Myron Sugerman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692985380
Category : Jewish criminals
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Myron Sugerman's memoir, The last Jewish gangster: from Meyer to Myron, is more than just arivetingg account of the author's nearly sixty-year career as an international outlaw in the field of slot machines and casinos. It's also a fascinating meditation on a variety of themes: aging, respect, adventure, greed, and man's tendency to be his own worst enemy. Although it's chock-full of hilarious anecdotes about Mr. Sugerman's hapless cohorts in what he calls "disorganized crime," the book also contains life lessons for those perceptive enough to look for them -- lessons on how to differentiate calculated risk-taking fromcompulsivee gambling, and on how to maintain one's place in the world as one grows older. The last Jewish gangster follows its author from 1959 to the present day as he travels the globe from Europe to Africa to South America to Asia, rubbing shoulders with dangerous men and legendary mob figures like Longie Zwillman, Meyer Lansky, Joe "Doc" Stacher, Gerry Catena, Tony Bananas Caponigro, Tommy Ryan Eboli, and many others. The story covers everything from his dealing with the fearsome Cali Cartel to his attempt to help famous Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal track down the angel of death, Josef Mengele in Paraguay. The remarkable book contains something to pique the interest of any reader -- gritty crime stories, harrowing adventure, twentieth century history, and Jewish religious philosophy -- and the perspective of a man who has lived a long life and seen more than most of us have imagined seeing."-- Cover page 4.

Author: Rich Cohen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439142505
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Award-winning writer Rich Cohen excavates the real stories behind the legend of infamous criminal enforcers Murder, Inc. and contemplates the question: Where did the tough Jews go? In 1930s Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who now exist only in legend and in the memories of a few old-timers: Jewish gangsters, fearless thugs with nicknames like Kid Twist Reles and Pittsburgh Phil Strauss. Growing up in Brownsville, they made their way from street fights to underworld power, becoming the execution squad for a national crime syndicate. Murder Inc. did for organized crime what Henry Ford did for the automobile, and Tough Jews is the first in-depth portrait of these men, a thrilling glimpse at the muscle that made possible the success of gangster statesmen such as Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano. For Rich Cohen, who grew up in suburban Illinois in the 1980s taunted by the stereotype of Jews as book-reading rule followers, the very idea of the Jewish gangster was a relief; for once, a Jew in jail did not have to be a white collar criminal. With a clear eye and a comic sensibility, Cohen looks beyond the blood and ultimately encounters each of these ruthless killers’ matzo-ball heart. Tough Jews shows what can happen when a member of the tribe combines brains, heart, and a dangerous determination never to back down.

Author: Michael Benson
Publisher: Citadel
ISBN: 0806541806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Now in paperback! The stunning true story of the rise of Nazism in America in the years leading to WWII—and the fearless Jewish gangsters and crime families who joined forces to fight back. With an intense cinematic style, acclaimed nonfiction crime author Michael Benson reveals the thrilling role of Jewish mobsters like Bugsy Siegel in stomping out the terrifying tide of Nazi sympathizers during the 1930s and 1940s. As Adolph Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany, a growing wave of fascism began to take root on American soil. Nazi activists started to gather in major American cities, and by 1933, there were more than one-hundred anti-Semitic groups operating openly in the United States. Few Americans dared to speak out or fight back—until an organized resistance of notorious Jewish mobsters (Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Red Levine, and others) waged their own personal war against the Nazis in their midst, gangland-style . . . Packed with surprising, little-known facts, graphic details, and unforgettable personalities, Gangsters vs. Nazis chronicles the mob’s most ruthless tactics in taking down fascism—inspiring ordinary Americans to join them in their fight. The book culminates in one of the most infamous events of the pre-war era—the 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden—in which law-abiding citizens stood alongside hardened criminals to fight against the Nazis for the soul of America. This is the story of the mob that’s rarely told—one of the most fascinating chapters in American history and American organized crime.

Author: Eddy Portnoy
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503603970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

Author: Alex Garel-Frantzen
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1625846614
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Al Capone. The Untouchables. The Valentine's Day massacre. You may think you know everything about the Roaring Twenties in the Windy City, but in the early twentieth century, the harsh environment of the Maxwell Street ghetto produced a proliferation of Jewish gangsters involved in everything from labor racketeering to white slavery. Their illegal activity offended their own community's value system and sparked rifts between Reform and Orthodox Jews. It also ignited tensions between city officials and Jewish leaders, indelibly marked the gentile population's perception of Chicago's Jews and shaped the city's West Side for years to come.

Author: Tod Goldberg
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619029685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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"Sal Cupertine is back—and better than ever. I love this guy." —Lee Child "Gangster Nation is a razor. It will slice you open and reveal your insides. And like the best of Tod Goldberg's work, it'll show you everything you are at your core." —Brad Meltzer, New York Times bestselling author of The President's Shadow It's been two years since the events of Gangsterland, when legendary Chicago hitman Sal Cupertine disappeared into the guise of Vegas Rabbi David Cohen. It’s September of 2001 and for David, everything is coming up gold: Temple membership is on the rise, the new private school is raking it in, and the mortuary and cemetery—where Cohen has been laundering bodies for the mob—is minting cash. But Sal wants out. He’s got money stashed in safe–deposit boxes all over the city. He’s looking at places to escape to, Mexico or maybe Argentina. He only needs to make it through the High Holidays, and he’ll have enough money to slip away, grab his wife and kid, and start fresh. Across the country, former FBI agent Matthew Drew is now running security for an Indian Casino outside of Milwaukee, spending his off–time stalking members of The Family, looking for vengeance for the murder of his former partner. So when Sal’s cousin stumbles into the casino one night, Matthew takes the law into his own hands—again—touching off a series of events that will have Rabbi Cohen running for his life, trapped in Las Vegas, with the law, society, and the post–9/11 world closing in around him. Gangster Nation is a thrilling follow–up to Gangsterland, an unexpected, page–turning examination of the seedy foundations of American life. With the wit and gritty glamor that defines his writing, Goldberg traces how the things we most value in our lives—home, health, even our spiritual lives—have been built on the enterprises of criminals.

Author: Ron Arons
Publisher: Barricade Books
ISBN: 9781569801536
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Once Ron Arons was over the shock of learning that his great-grandfather had done a 'stretch' in the famed sing sing prison, he embarked on a journey to learn more about his ancestor and how he landed in jail. What he discovered was that between 1880 and 1950 there were thousands of Jews behind bars at Sing Sing, for crimes ranging from incest to arson to selling air rights over Manhattan. The Jews of Sing Sing is the first book to fully expose the scope of Jewish criminality over the past 160 years, and it features famous gangsters like Lepke Buchalter.

Author: Jarrod Tanny
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253001382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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“Outstanding . . . A delightfully written work of serious scholarship.” —Jewish Book World Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the nineteenth century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the nineteenth century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il’ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives. “Traces the emergence, development, and persistence of the myth of Odessa as both Garden of Eden and Gomorrah . . . A joy to read.” —Robert Weinberg, Swarthmore College