Book presentation. Cities are central to prosperity: they are hubs of innovation and growth. Yet the economic vitality of wealthy cities is marred by persistent and pervasive inequality. In his new book Unequal Cities, economist Richard McGahey argues that deeply entrenched anti-urban policies and politics limit cities' options to address inequality. Many factors – structural […]

Throughout history, Jews have been accused of using the blood of non-Jews for “rituals.” This accusation, which as come to be called “blood libel,” dates to the second century BCE and continued to grow with the spread of Christianity. In the Middle Ages, the motif made its way into art and literature like Chaucer’s Canterbury […]

Rita Kaplan Lowenstein was born in Warsaw, Poland to Jewish parents Bernard and Rachel Kaplan. Her father owned chemical manufacturing plants around Warsaw, and her mother was a pianist and piano teacher. After the Nazis invaded Poland, the family was forced into the Warsaw ghetto. In August 1942, Rita and her parents escaped the ghetto […]

Reading. As It Turns Out is a family story. Alice Sedgwick Wohl is writing to her brother Bobby, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1965, just before their sister Edie Sedgwick met Andy Warhol. After unexpectedly coming across Edie’s image in a clip from Warhol’s extraordinary film Outer and Inner Space, Wohl was moved […]

Skateboarding isn’t just a recreational activity, but a professional sport, lifestyle, art form, and cultural phenomenon. The striking book Four Wheels and a Board: The Smithsonian History of Skateboarding captures its spirited history, iconic skateboarders, diverse community, and the palpable passion of the people who love it. Betsy Gordon, one of the authors of Four […]

Online lecture.

Commemorate Washington’s emotional farewell to his Officers that took place in the Long Room on December 4, 1783 with $1 admission to the Museum! Witness a reenactment of the Farewell in the room where it happened and explore the Museum’s newest exhibition, Cloaked Crusader: George Washington in Comics and Pop Culture.

Lauren Young’s new book, Hitler’s Girl, is a groundbreaking history that reveals how authoritarianism nearly took hold in Great Britain in the 1930s. Young details the pervasiveness of Nazi sympathies among the British aristocracy, as significant factions of the upper class methodically pursued an actively pro-German agenda. They formed a murky so-called Fifth Column to […]

Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition.

Since the nineteenth century Jews have been involved in organized crime all over the U.S. Some of the most famous mafiosos including Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Mickey Cohen were all Jewish boys who grew into some of the most influential underground figures we know. These activities flourished during Prohibition, as many became deeply entrenched […]

Famed marine biologist, photographer, and USCG-licensed captain, Gaelin Rosenwaks, will join in conversation with historian and journalist, Jessica DuLong, for this riveting evening on the heels of the release of Rosewak’s new book Sperm Whales: The Gentle Goliaths of the Oceans. Join the Seaport Museum when Rosenwaks shares insights and stories from her magical moments […]

Reading. Well before COVID-19 swept across the United States and the chairman of Tyson Foods infamously declared that the food supply chain was dangerously vulnerable, America’s meat industry was reaching a breaking point. Years of consolidation, price-fixing, and power grabs by elite industry insiders have harmed consumers and caused environmental destruction. Americans have no idea […]

In 1786, Charles Wilson Peale created the most important—and most famous—museum in Revolutionary era America. A fusion of natural history and art, Peale’s Philadelphia Museum was meant to be an embodiment of the Enlightenment. In this lecture, Lee Dugatkin will explore science, art, and the Enlightenment in early America and how these fed the appetite […]

The New York Jewish Book Festival opens with a screening of the first episode of Fleishman Is in Trouble followed by a conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman Is in Trouble and the creator, writer, and showrunner of the FX series on Hulu, and A.O. Scott, film critic at The New York Times. Brodesser-Akner […]

The daylong event will touch on themes of Jewish heritage including culture and history, modern life and literature, the Holocaust, food and cookbooks, and books for kids and families. Featuring talks, panels, and author signings.

Cleyvis Natera, Lan Samantha Chang and Jacquelyn Mitchard read from their work during this month's virtual salon. The theme: trauma.

Join China Institute online to have a conversation with Paul Salopek, who is now walking through China as part of his ambitious 24,000-mile Out of Eden Walk journey. Started in 2013 in Ethiopia, “Out of Eden Walk” is a unique “slow journalism” project to walk the pathways of the first humans who migrated out of […]

In the new book Arthur Miller: American Witness from Yale’s Jewish Lives series, distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings a unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller, the playwright who almost singlehandedly brought twentieth century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life and concentrating […]

In their presentation “Gentleman’s Agreement: Hollywood’s Stand Against Anti-Semitism,” documentary director Cecilia Peck and film historian Claudine Stevens will bring to life the struggles and achievements of creating the groundbreaking Oscar-winning film. Seventy-five years ago, Gentleman’s Agreement bravely crossed a line to become a critically acclaimed, top-grossing film that exposed antisemitism in New York and […]

Today, the once bustling, fragrant fish market in lower Manhattan's South Street Seaport is a rebuilt retail destination with a new kind of marketing – but from its founding in 1822, through its move to the Bronx in 2005, the Fulton Fish Market was an iconic New York institution. At first a neighborhood market for […]

Launch of a new editor and author conversation series with Stephen Markley, the bestselling author of Ohio, to celebrate the launch of his new book, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

When Nazi plans were learned and promptly ignored by local and federal authorities in Los Angeles, a number of Jews working in Hollywood secretly funded a spy ring that operated from August 1933 until the end of WWII. These spies uncovered a series of plots aimed at attracting international attention to the Nazi cause and […]

Nathanael O’Reilly, Caitlin McDonnell, Rio Cortez, Catherine Woodard and JP Howard! read from their work during this month's virtual salon.

History was made on Oct. 24, 2022 when for the first time the image of an Asian American appeared on United States currency. This distinct honor goes to Anna May Wong (黄柳霜), a groundbreaking actress in the 20th century during the rise of the film industry and a champion for Asian American representation in film. […]

Budapest, 1944: Vice Consul Carl Lutz and the Swiss Legation of Budapest started the largest diplomatic operation to rescue Jews during WWII. Thanks to an ingenious system of safe-conduct papers and residential buildings put under consular protection, Carl Lutz, who had acted as a protective power representing interests of the U.S. and UK in Hungary, […]

During Deeper Lectures Sahar Damoni shares the context and journey that has shaped her life and work as a Palestinian artist in Israel/Palestine, sharing key, life-changing moments that led her to choose dance and choreography as tools of expression.

Two multi-hyphenate artists share excerpts from their new book projects—Daniel Alexander Jones’ Love as Light and jaamil olawale kosoko’s Black Body Amnesia–discussing the process for creating as a source of healing self and community. Their “duet” conversation will also address themes of friendship, grace, and loving as a gesture of self-sovereignty.

The Neiger family was living a peaceful life in the Jewish community of Krakow when the arrival of World War II changed their lives forever. When Nazis forced the family into harsh Ghetto life, they made a vow to escape as a family. But when circumstances forced the family to separate from older brother Ben, […]

Annelies and Marianne Bernstein were among the 1,700 German Jews in Berlin who survived the Holocaust by posing as non-Jews. Known as “U-boats” in the slang of their time, the sisters hid in plain sight with the help of ingenuity, grit, and luck. Join us to find out how “the Steins” used their new names […]

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum. Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, […]

Reading. A sweeping, unique graphic memoir about an artist’s year abroad in Paris and how it gave way to an all-encompassing love affair and crushing heartbreak as he wrestled with trauma, masculinity, and the real possibility of hope.

Sarah Morgenthau interviews Andrew Meier about his book, Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty, a New York Times Editors’ Choice which follows the epic and intimate portrait of four generations of the Morgenthau family, a dynasty of power brokers and public officials with an outsize—and previously unmapped—influence shaping the American Century […]

New conversation series between fiction and non-fiction writers, in which writers discuss the ways in which they grapple with similar subject matter through different lenses, and with different perspectives. The stories and essays in this volume—a follow-up to his debut in English, Rock, Paper, Scissors—tackle major questions of modern life in and beyond Russia with […]

Examine the work of photographers who are lending their voices to defining what it means to be Indigenous today. Photojournalists Donovan Quintero (Navajo), Tailyr Irvine (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), and Russel Albert Daniels (Diné descent and Ho-Chunk descent)—whose works are featured in the museum’s Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field exhibition in New […]

Black History Month lecture.

A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, power, and fame in these complex and fascinating relationships. RSVP required.

Encanto tells the tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals, who live hidden in the mountains of Colombia in a magical house, in a vibrant town, in a wondrous, charmed place called an Encanto. The magic of the Encanto has blessed every child in the family with a unique gift—from super strength to the power […]

Black History Month lecture.

On an August night in 1923, Zhu Ziqing and Yu Pingbo, two prominent Chinese writers, took a boat ride along the famed Qinhuai River in Nanjing and each wrote an essay under the same title of “Splashing Oars and Lantern Light on the Qinhuai River.” Both pieces subsequently becamme classics in the history of modern […]

David Wiener was born on May 30, 1926, in Lodz, Poland, one of Moshe Chaim and Hannah Sur Wiener’s nine children. When he was thirteen, David escaped alone from Lodz, which had been turned into a ghetto in February 1940. During the war, David survived slave labor camps, prison, and Auschwitz. His parents and all […]

Two of the greatest Jewish voices of the past half-century appear on stage together for the first time in what promises to be a significant public intellectual event. French philosopher, essayist, playwright, and filmmaker Bernard-Henri Lévy joins heroic former Soviet prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky to address and debate the most urgent questions of our […]

Louis Greenstein, Sufija Abdur-Rahman, and Sara Lippman read from their work during this month's virtual salon.

An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised […]

An intimate and empowering anthology of essays that explore the changing face of female desire in whip-smart, sensuous prose, with pieces by Tara Conklin, Camille Dungy, Melissa Febos, Lisa Taddeo, […]

Romance novels have historically been written by women, for women and about women. The genre has gone through many iterations over time, from the early romances of Jane Austen to […]

Family lore had it that author Bonnie Siegler’s grandfather Jules crossed paths with Marilyn Monroe in Midtown Manhattan late one night in 1954, her white dress flying up around her […]

During Deeper Lectures Sahar Damoni shares the context and journey that has shaped her life and work as a Palestinian artist in Israel/Palestine, sharing key, life-changing moments that led her […]

Why are queer communities often found at geographic peripheries like the waterfront? What is the connection between drag and the seaport? Join the Seaport Museum for a conversation with drag […]

Black History Month lecture.

Many in the second generation have chosen to write about their experiences as the children of Holocaust survivors. The products of these efforts take many different forms, from personal recollections […]

In the new book Arthur Miller: American Witness from Yale’s Jewish Lives series, distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings a unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller, the playwright who almost singlehandedly brought twentieth century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life and concentrating […]

In celebration of Black History Month, join Cornelius Eady, renowned poet, musician, co-founder of Cave Canem, and former Interim Director of Poets House for a reading and talk. Recently he launched Poets House’s Open House, a weekly radio program on WBAI, with co-host Patricia Spears Jones. He is the author of several celebrated collections of […]

Reading and discussion. The untold story of climate migration in the United States—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.

Black History Month lecture.

The Rosenstrasse Protest of 1943 was held against the incarceration and potential deportation of roughly 2,000 people who were arrested by the Gestapo on February 27, 1943. With their loved ones held at Rosenstraße 2-4 in Berlin, family members, many of whom were women, kept their protest going for a week until Nazi leader Joseph […]

Innovations rarely come from “experts.” When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that they more than […]

YA launch with Lizzy Mason. In a world that feels distorted by celebrity and the manipulations of social media and public opinion, Natalie and Carter need something real to hold […]

Join historian and author Claire Bellerjeau as she introduces Elizabeth, or Liss. Enslaved on Long Island, Liss showed great agency when she risked everything to escape with a British commander […]

Set in Civil Rights–era Harlem, this novel features shady cops and local gangsters in an entertaining and spellbinding way. Join NYPL staff for a moderated discussion.

Reading. A Bustle, LitHub, Debutiful, and NYLON Most Anticipated Book of 2023. A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and […]

Géraldine Schwarz’s riveting account of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II is an urgent warning against forgetting the lessons of history in the dangerous rise of […]

In this special Saturday afternoon lecture, Julie Flavell will present her book The Howe Dynasty, the first biography of a British "First Family." The Howe family had as much at […]

Women's History Month lecture.

Lecture.

Joint book launch. From Sophie Ward, the Booker Prize-longlisted author of Love and Other Thought Experiments, comes a masterful and gripping thriller about truth, silence, and the weight of the […]

An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City, written by Phillip James Dodd with photography by Jonathan Wallen, is a sumptuous book on an era – roughly from the […]

For this month's Non-Fiction/Fiction conversation series Join Sarah Schulman and K.M. Soehnlein in commemorating the 30-year anniversary of ACT UP.

John Sibley Williams, Barbara Graham, and Sergio Troncoso read from their work during this month's virtual salon.

With its gleaming shopping centers and refurbished row houses, today’s Harlem bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. In The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and […]

In this lecture, Ken Scarlett will discuss the British Southern Strategy for conquering America and extinguishing the American Revolution. He will discuss the role of a quisling in the framing […]

Brooklyn born novelist, poet, educator and international speaker, Ellease Ebele N. Oseye, whom Maya Angelou described as "a seer of the interior landscape," has been teaching literature of African peoples […]

In commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the American war in Iraq, join us for an informal and open discussion about the war through political cartoons. In addition, we can […]

In commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the American war in Iraq, join us for an informal and open discussion about the war through political cartoons. In addition, we can […]

Reading and discussion. A young woman finds herself in the crosshairs of powerful and very dangerous enemies when she travels to Cairo to uncover the truth about her brother’s mysterious […]

The Sassoons, known as “the Rothschilds of the East,” were one of the richest families in the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Baghdadi Jewish family built a […]

In this program, poet David Mills will read from and reflect upon the research behind his poetry collection, Boneyarn, a book of poems about slavery in New York City. For […]

Dr. Gisella Perl was a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist who was imprisoned at Auschwitz. While there, she acted to address the terrors that were visited upon women by the Nazi regime, […]

Book discussion group. All are welcome.

Delve into the events leading up to the Alhambra Decree and what happened to the Jewish community in the wake of the edict in this panel discussion. On March 31, […]

Lecture. Between 1776 and 1783, Great Britain hired more than thirty thousand German soldiers to fight in its war against the American rebels. Collectively known as Hessians, the soldiers and […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted many industries around the world—banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, manufacturing and retail. But it has only just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better […]

Livestreamed. Thirty-five years after this landmark of urban history – originally titled We're Still Here in a 1986 first edition – Jill Jonnes continues to chronicle the rise, fall, rebirth, […]

Lecture. China’s growth over the past four decades has positioned state capitalism as a durable foil to the orthodoxy of free markets, to the confusion of many in the West. […]

Founded in 1420, the Forbidden City in Beijing had served as the center of Chinese royal power for five centuries. Following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the […]

Abdul Ali, Hananah Zaheer and Rosalia Scalia read from their work during this month's virtual salon.

In the summer of 1781, after spying on the British troops in Manhattan for six weeks, General Washington and General Rochambeau made a critical decision. They would not attack the […]

In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So "Post-Racial" America is a memoir in essays about young Black women and the stereotypes and preconceived notions they are […]

Inspired by the adventurous spirit of The NYRB Classics series, NYRB Poets features the work of poets from around the world, classical and modern, ancient and contemporary, in elegant, pocket-size […]