Rating: 
Summary: Tough Jews
Review: In the early 20th century, many newly coming immigrants found work in America hoping for a better life. With these newly arriving immigrants, crime and violence was brought as well. Crime organizations formed in big cities from groups of immigrants coming together and creating gangs. These gangs committed criminal acts to make money, their sons learned from their fathers. Until the early 1920s when prohibition took an effect, criminal families had no great source of income. With this new way of earning money from bootlegging alcohol to speakeasies and such, the crime families prospered. Every ethnic gang profited from prohibition, Jews, Italians, Russians, Irish, and Asians. When Prohibition died, so did most of the criminal activity. With law enforcement growing and becoming keener to the ways of criminal families, crime organizations have become more and more secret. Today no one knows how powerful the underworld of crime is, but it still exists. Overall this book about famous gangsters was a wonderful book. If you enjoy reading about gangsters and how the made their money this book is for you.
Rating: 
Summary: An exploration of Jewishness
Review: My father was born in 1904 in a small, nondescript town called Lomza between Warsaw and Bylaistock. It was 70 per cent Jews. By 1943 not a single Jew was left. His parents bought a tickets for America that same year but but were swindled - the tickets were for no further than Liverpool. My father grew up a tough, streetwise kid, with his eyes fixed across the Atlantic always knowing that one day he would get to the Promised Land. In 1921 he signed on as a ship's baker (his father's trade) and jumped ship in New York. He got involved in running beer between Canada and New York during Prohibition and learned to be an American. In 1929, his older brother Issy was sent out to join him but on entering the country was found to have tuberculosis and was sent back. Too sick to travel alone, my father went with him, cashing in his stocks a few months before the Wall Street Crash. He arrived back in England at the start of the Depression with capital, got a girl pregnant, got married, got divorced, built a business, got married again. And his two daughters growing up in English suburbia were never allowed to forget that the greatest guys on earth were the Tough Jews - the Jewish gangsters like Arnold Rothenstein and Dutch Schultz. I never understood why he - a respectable businessman - venerated them so until I devoured Rich Cohen's book. because - and is a point some other reviewers here have missed - the Jewish gangsters gave kids like my father a sense of being big shots. As Cohen says, in time that feeling was transferred to the Israeli army and indeed my father fundraised for the terrorists who were fighting British rule in Palestine. But the need for Jews to have icons - people more powerful than themselves to give them the gumption to fight - was what made the Jewish gangsters more than just brutal thugs. This is a wonderful book. It is a book of Jewish history. I wish my father had lived long enough to read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice try, well-intentioned but filled with boneheaded errors
Review: Nice try, Rich. But do some fact-checking before publishing your next tome. Here are some howlers from the pages of "Tough Jews": Factual errors: 1. Lake Michigan is not situated between the United States and Canada, hence no bootlegging was run in motorboats across it. Whiskey was illegally brought into the U.S. from Canada via the Detroit River and Lake St. Claire 2. Paul Robeson was a bass-baritone, not a tenor. 3. The Yalta Conference was not held after the defeat of Hitler in 1945. It was held in Feb, 1945, three months before the German surrender. 4. The author's father could not have listened to Sinatra's classic album "In the Wee, Small Hours of the Evening" before going into the army in the fall of 1954. The album was released in 1955. 5. The Jewish mobsters in Detroit were known as The Purple Gang, not The Purple Mob.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, though flawed, account
Review: Not a horrible book, but not a great one either. (I'd give it 2 and half stars if that were possible.) It's strange to see the defensive, rally-the- troops responses that are frequently posted after a book like "Tough Jews" receives a negative customer review on Amazon. What gives? Aren't readers entitled to dislike or find fault with an author's work without being attacked as a "yutz" or a "putz"? (Could the "defenders of the faith," in fact, be friends or family of the author, if not the author himself, posting under the cloak of anonymous e-mail accounts?) In truth, the most glaring problem with "Tough Jews" is a pervasive simplemindedness; I have no problem with an author writing an homage to famous underworld characters, but how about some context? Cohen offers little sense of the poverty and destitution which lead many immigrant groups, not simply Jews, to spawn a criminal class. (Imagine the hue and cry if an Irish-American wrote a celebratory book about "great" IRA gunman and murderers, without placing them in the complex, social setting of centuries-old British oppression of the Irish.) For a more intelligent, thoughtprovoking look a the world of the Jewish mob, I recommend the Fried book ("The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America"), Jenna Joselit's "Our Gang," Robert Lacey's "Little Man," Asbury's "The Gangs of New York" and the now somewhat dated "Murder Inc." by Burton Turkus (a book, incidentally, from which Rich Cohen seems to have "lifted" wholesale passages.) There's also the wonderful, hard-to-find novel, "The Hoods," which became the basis for "Once Upon a Time In America." Now, I'm sure that someone will quickly post a five-star rebuttal, denoucing this critique as the babbling of a small- minded "shmuck" or "shmendrick" -- but whattaya gonna do, bubeleh? Send the old Brownsville troop to clip me?
Rating:
Summary: EVEN JEWS CAN BE LOW-LIFERS
Review: Obviously, the people in this book are not the cream of Jewish society. This book,somewhat sympathetic to the characters involved, but read in conjunction with Robert Rockaway's BUT-HE WAS GOOD TO HIS MOTHER, provides a good introduction to this thug genre.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful Tale of Hebrew Hitmen
Review: Once you get past the glossy cover and the pretty-boy photo of the author, you realize that this is a no-holds barred romp through gangland -- Brooklyn-style. And, style is the right word. Without glamorizing (too much) the world of killers and theives, the author gives us some of the greatest stories about the toughest thugs in U.S. history. What's really exceptional is that the book not only puts you in the streets of Brooklyn but in the mind of these killers. If my friends and I are any gauge, this is an instant classic. No joke, as far as gang books, I'd put this up there with the all time greats: the Godfather, Wiseguys, Man of Honor. Also, as a bonus, the writer serves up some incredibly amusing anecdotes about his father and his Brooklyn buddies. "Army of Occupation, Baby!" This is destined to be one of the all time great lines in the annals of American non-fiction. My suggestion: read this book now; give it as a gift; talk it up. That way you can seem really hip when the movie comes out! Hey, that's what I'm doing.
Rating:
Summary: Truly Great Read. Don't Miss this Beauty of a Book!
Review: Read this book on a flight from New York to LA. Re-read it on the flight back to New York. I loved every page. And, it saved me from the usual cigar-free purgatory that is coast-to-coast air travel. The book began with the terrific title and cover photo. But that was just the beginning (literally, ha ha). The book contains some great stories and some great tips on how to handle business (gangster style). The bonus for me was that the Chapter 1 contained a great LA restaurant recommendation -- a place called Nate and Al's. It was terrific (although very painful heartburn followed lunch; always does when I eat pastrami). By the way, this is an ideal father's day gift. Too bad my kids can't give it to me, since I've already read it. Also, I'd hope the kids spend a bit more money on me than the ten bucks the book will set you back. I'd get it for my dad but he's passed on (too bad -- he would have loved it). Hell, despite the fact that the old bugger annoys me to no end, I might even give it to my wife's step-father. The first gift I will have given the crackpot in 22 years!
Rating: 
Summary: not so tough jews
Review: Rich Cohen has written a not so tough interpretation of the tough Jews but mostly about a section of the sick population of East new York.To having lived in this era i feel qualified to comment about it.These people were anything but tough just plain sick and out to control a people that coudn't protect themselves.Mr. Cohen is an excellent writer I'm sure but Idon't see how any one could glorify these characters.
Rating:
Summary: Misplaced admiration
Review: Rich Cohen is not a bad writer but his approach here is often choppy. I found some of the anecdotes regarding these gangsters interesting and entertaining. My main problem with the book is in the way the father and his friends are presented to admire nostalgically these criminals from the old neighborhoods and recount their exploits to give themselves an aura of toughness. I think the approach wears thin after a while and besides there are better examples of Jewish "toughness" if that is the sole point of this exercise. (the warsaw uprising and today's Israeli army come to mind).
Rating:
Summary: Misplaced admiration
Review: Rich Cohen is not a bad writer but his approach here is often choppy. I found some of the anecdotes regarding these gangsters interesting and entertaining. My main problem with the book is in the way the father and his friends are presented to admire nostalgically these criminals from the old neighborhoods and recount their exploits to give themselves an aura of toughness. I think the approach wears thin after a while and besides there are better examples of Jewish "toughness" if that is the sole point of this exercise. (the warsaw uprising and today's Israeli army come to mind).
|
