Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side: Narratives Out of Time

Harlem and the Lower East Side are two neighborhoods that evoke not only a rich if contested history, but also a particular “racial” narrative. Indeed, these spaces—one downtown and one uptown on Manhattan Island—have become almost synonymous with the Jewish American and the African American experience in the twentieth century. Chinatown and Little Italy have been replicated across the country, but there is only one Harlem and only one Lower East Side.
This edited volume traces and compares the literary representation of these two iconic city spaces over the course of the twentieth century. Bringing together prominent as well emerging scholars, Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side engages in spatially informed readings of twentieth-century Jewish American and African American literature. The book offers new approaches to Jewish American and African American literary criticism while providing the first truly comprehensive overview of how Black Harlem and the Jewish East Side have been represented—and how their representations have dovetailed as well as diverged—throughout the twentieth century in African American and Jewish American literature.