Intro.....
Professor Joel Dinerstein
The Last of the Ellis Island Jews, SUNY Press
This book is a memoir of a lost place and time – and the experience of growing up working-class, Jewish, in Brooklyn, during the 60s – 80s. In 47 short vignettes, Dinerstein captures so much urban and cultural history – stickball, Yiddish, the food, Wel-Met summer camps, the sights and sounds of the streets – but also what ended it – the confusion of White Flight and the “terrible trade” that Joel contends Jews made in the 1980s of their lively diasporic culture for victimhood and trauma. It’s a memoir with bite and also a significant contribution to his field of American cultural studies/cool.
Professor Yuri Herrera
Aztlán, DC - The most important election in Mexican American history, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2026.
In this satirical short story, "Aztlán, DC" deftly contemplates a changing twenty-first century American landscape as “the last gringo president on the last day of his term” hands his title to the first Mexican president of the United States.
Professor Nathaniel Rich
Cloudthief, Macmillan Publishers.
From the award-winning author Nathaniel Rich, Cloudthief is a heist novel for a new era, in which the most valuable things in life are virtual, privacy is a sick joke, and security is relative. After all is lost, what remains? Forget banks, casinos, museums—society’s most valuable treasure sits in the giant, anonymous data centers that power modern life. There, in endless rows of hard drives, lies the sum of our civilization’s knowledge, all of the world’s personal and private truths, uploaded and saved. They wait unseen, unexploited, and, most critically, unguarded.