More in ‘Great Depression’

Judaism is a religion of cycles. Most congregations read the entirety of the Torah over the course of a year, though some stretch it into three years. There’s the Daf Yomi, a cycle in which the learned plow through the Babylonian Talmud in a 7.5 year cycle. Its primary and secondary texts describe cycles in ...

In the irrational exuberance of 1928, everything seemed possible. Boards of directors could plan enormous synagogues in glistening white stone to rival the Parthenon. Academic dreamers could design a great Jewish university with towers, courtyards, and gardens to challenge the magnificence of Princeton or Oxford. No ambition was too large, no plan too expensive. One had only to hire an architect, draw an elegant façade, and watch the building fund fill. Then, in October, 1929, the great building boom ended with a crash, leaving magnificent synagogues on architects’ drawing boards, forever unbuilt. It all feels very 2008. What follows is a glimpse at some of the more ambitious plans and what, ultimately, became of them.

Just as the octogenarian survivors of the Great Depression are about to go extinct, we are beginning to suffer, in the winter of 2008-2009, another catastrophe—with the collapse of our most prominent investment banks, the failure of giant insurers, and the nationalization of so many related businesses. We meet these challenges today with an undifferentiated ...

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Mitchell Berkowitz has vivid memories of his Yiddish-speaking neighbors and the early-morning sound of horse-drawn milk wagons. As a child during the Depression, he spent summers in upstate New York, where farmers rented out rooms to working-class Jewish families to make ends meet; the rooms were called kuch alayns, ...

Samuel Fuller, the greatest iconoclast ever to take a paycheck from 20th Century-Fox, was born in 1912, in the sleepy middle-class burb of Worcester, Massachusetts (to a Baum from Poland and a Rabinovitch from Russia—the family changed its name to “Fuller” before he was born). He covered crime for the New York Evening Graphic at ...