This work acts as a window into the lives of the Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side during the early 1900s. The detail with which he explains the complicated topics with ease proves the depth of his knowledge about turn-of-the-century Jewish New York. A must-read for history enthusiasts.

Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition of The Spirit of the Ghetto - Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York. It was previously published by other bona fide publishers, and is now, after many years, back in print. This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by Hutchins Hapgood, which is now, at last, again available to you. Get the PDF and EPUB NOW as well. Included in your purchase you have The Spirit of the Ghetto - Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York in EPUB AND PDF format to read on any tablet, eReader, desktop, laptop or smartphone simultaneous - Get it NOW. Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside The Spirit of the Ghetto - Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York: Look inside the book: There are few more pathetic sights than an old man with a long beard, a little black cap on his head and a venerable face—a man who had been perhaps a Hebraic or Talmudic scholar in the old country, carrying or pressing piles of coats in the melancholy sweat-shop; or standing for sixteen hours a day by his push-cart in one 12 of the dozen crowded streets of the Ghetto, where the great markets are, selling among many other things apples, garden stuff, fish and second-hand shirts. ...There is many a huge building on Broadway which is the external sign (with the Hebrew name of the tenant emblazoned on some extended surface) of the energy and independence of some ignorant little Russian Jew, the son of a push-cart peddler or sweat-shop worker, who began his business career on the sidewalks, selling newspapers, blacking boots, dealing in candles, shoe-strings, fruit, etc., and continued it by peddling 29 in New Jersey or on Long Island until he could open a small basement store on Hester Street, then a more extensive establishment on Canal Street—ending perhaps as a rich merchant on Broadway.

First published in 1902, and illustrated by Jacob Epstein, this evocation of the spiritual and cultural life of Yiddish New York remains fresh and relevant, and an invaluable commentary on one aspect of the formation of modern America. To an extent unequaled by any outsider before him, Hutchins Hapgood, a descendant of generations of New England Yankees, succeeded in penetrating the inner life of an American immigrant community. Hapgood did not set out to reform and cleanse the ghetto. His aim was to understand and interpret it, to find and know its poets, scholars, dramatists, actors, and artists, as well as its merchants and businessmen. He presents real people, individually identified and described, working out their destiny as part of a vital Jewish world. The sensibility and intentions of this book, as the editor points out, "anticipated a period of unexampled American artistic and intellectual gusto and creativity." Moses Rischin's discerning and affectionate introduction places Hapgood's neglected classic squarely in the mainstream of American cultural development.