What caused four recently bar mitzvahed middle-class youths to go on a crime spree of assault and murder in 1954? This book provides a compelling narrative retelling of the boys, their crimes, and a U.S. culture obsessed with juvenile delinquency. After ongoing months of daily headlines about gang shootouts, stomp-killings, and millions of dollars worth of vandalism, by the summer of 1954, America had had enough of juvenile delinquency. It was in this environment that 18-year-old Jack Koslow and the other three teenage members of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers committed their heinous crimes and achieved notoriety. The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s exposes the underbelly of America's mid-century, the terrible price of assimilation, the uncomfortable bedfellows of comic books and juvenile delinquency, and the dystopia already in bloom amongst American youth well before the 1960s. Readers will be engrossed and horrified by the tale of the Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang whose shocking, front-page story could easily have been copy-pasted from today's online news sites. Author Mariah Adin takes readers along for a breathtaking moment-by-moment retelling of the crime spree, the subsequent interrogations, and the dramatic courtroom showdown, interspersed with expository chapters on juvenile delinquency, America's Jewish community in the post-Holocaust period, and the anti-comics movement. This book serves to merge the history of juvenile delinquency with that of the Great Comic Book Scare, highlights the assimilation of immigrants into America's white mainstream gone wrong, and complicates our understanding of America's "Golden Age."

What caused four recently bar mitzvahed middle-class youths to go on a crime spree of assault and murder in 1954? This book provides a compelling narrative retelling of the boys, their crimes, and a U.S. culture obsessed with juvenile delinquency. After ongoing months of daily headlines about gang shootouts, stomp-killings, and millions of dollars worth of vandalism, by the summer of 1954, America had had enough of juvenile delinquency. It was in this environment that 18-year-old Jack Koslow and the other three teenage members of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers committed their heinous crimes and achieved notoriety. The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s exposes the underbelly of America's mid-century, the terrible price of assimilation, the uncomfortable bedfellows of comic books and juvenile delinquency, and the dystopia already in bloom amongst American youth well before the 1960s. Readers will be engrossed and horrified by the tale of the Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang whose shocking, front-page story could easily have been copy-pasted from today's online news sites. Author Mariah Adin takes readers along for a breathtaking moment-by-moment retelling of the crime spree, the subsequent interrogations, and the dramatic courtroom showdown, interspersed with expository chapters on juvenile delinquency, America's Jewish community in the post-Holocaust period, and the anti-comics movement. This book serves to merge the history of juvenile delinquency with that of the Great Comic Book Scare, highlights the assimilation of immigrants into America's white mainstream gone wrong, and complicates our understanding of America's "Golden Age."

A collected history of the 100 most notorious criminals to walk the streets of the New York City borough. Brooklyn’s Most Wanted parades an impressive perp walk of 100 of the borough’s most notorious, ranking them meticulously from bad to worst. From crime bosses to career criminals to corrupt politicians, pedophile priests to Ponzi scammers, this is not your usual crime chronicle. You want labor racketeering, Ponzi scheming, hijacking, murder, loan sharking, arson, illegal gambling, money laundering? Fugetaboutit! Take this guided gangland tour of Brooklyn, the broken land, and meet everyone from the South Brooklyn Boys to the Soviet thugs of Brighton Beach’s Little Odessa. Want to know what Billy the Kid, John Wilkes Booth and the Son of Sam all have in common? Brooklyn. Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, Al Capone, Frankie Yale, Paul Vario, Roy DeMeo and so many more malicious malcontents and maniacs stalk these pages, as author Craig McGuire rank a rogues’ gallery of the best of the worst from Brooklyn’s crime-ridden past and present. This includes more than a century of screaming crime blotter headlines, spotlighting epic cases, like The Brooklyn Godmother, The Sex Killer of Brooklyn, The Nurse Girl Murder, The Long Island Railroad Massacre, The Thrill Kills Gang, and many more. From “Son of Sam” to “Son of Sal,” “Little Lepke” to “Big Paulie,” “The Butcher of Brooklyn,” “The Vampire of Brooklyn,” “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” and even “The Man Who Murdered Brooklyn Baseball,” they’re all here. Much more than Murder Incorporated, this book features kingpins and lone wolves alike, with a line-up featuring many of the multi-ethnic mobs mimicking the original La Cosa Nostra—the Russian Mafia, the Albanian Mafia, the Polish Mafia, the Greek Mafia—in fact, this book contains more mafias than you can shake a bloody blackjack at. The author’s proprietary Notorious Brooklyn Index analyzes criminal activity, socio-economic type, notoriety, relation to Brooklyn and more for a final score that’s far from conjecture—though it will undoubtedly spark debate. Praise for Brooklyn’s Most Wanted “Never has anyone put together a look into so many of Brooklyn’s worst. This is a great read I highly recommend.” —Thomas Dades, retired NYPD detective, bestselling author of Friends of the Family “If you love all-things-Brooklyn like I do, this is an absolute must-read you need on your shelf. . . . A revealing, rousing, rip-roaring tour that will slice you right into the underbelly of New York City’s most historic borough.” —Ron Valdes, co-founder, Brooklyn Creative Partners

Superman is the original superhero, an American icon, and arguably the most famous character in the world--and he's Jewish! Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and Joe Shuster, an immigrant. They based their hero's origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem, and his nebbish secret identity on themselves. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World War II and sent him to tear Nazi tanks apart nearly two years before the US joined the war. In the following decades, Superman's mostly Jewish writers, artists, and editors continued to borrow Jewish motifs for their stories, basing Krypton's past on Genesis and Exodus, its society on Jewish culture, the trial of Lex Luthor on Adolf Eichmann's, and a future holiday celebrating Superman on Passover. A fascinating journey through comic book lore, American history, and Jewish tradition, this book examines the entirety of Superman's career from 1938 to date, and is sure to give readers a newfound appreciation for the Mensch of Steel!

"An exuberant true-life adventure following two very different men - a loveable huckster turned publisher of DC Comics and the man he helped escape from 1930s Berlin - as they cross paths with icons of midcentury pop culture in pursuit of the American dream"--

Comic books have presented fictional and fact-based stories of the Korean War, as it was being fought and afterward. Comparing these comics with events that inspired them offers a deeper understanding of the comics industry, America's "forgotten war," and the anti-comics movement, championed by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who criticized their brutalization of the imagination. Comics--both newsstand offerings and government propaganda--used fictions to justify the unpopular war as necessary and moral. This book examines the dramatization of events and issues, including the war's origins, germ warfare, brainwashing, Cold War espionage, the nuclear threat, African Americans in the military, mistreatment of POWs, and atrocities.

This book analyses articles that appeared in popular periodicals from the 1920s to the present, each revealing the panic that parents and adults have expressed about media including radio, television, video games and the Internet for the last century. Karen Leick argues that parents have continuously shown an intense anxiety about new media, while expressing a romanticized nostalgia for their own youth. Recurring tropes describe concerns about each "addictive" new media: children do not play outside anymore, lack imagination, and may imitate violent or other inappropriate content that they encounter.