Books About Brooklyn
The Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative (BJHI) is suggesting books about Brooklyn for our visitors.
The Brooklyn Nobody Knows: An Urban Walking Guide
by Cecilia Margules
We’re Brooklyn
In order to find out about her family’s Brooklyn roots, Rebecca and her little brother Seth explore the borough with their grandma Sophia. During their Brooklyn journey they will see the city’s past and present and learn about their Jewish heritage and family’s story.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/4CdtxOX.
by William B. Helmreich
A one-of-a-kind walking guide to Brooklyn, from the man who walked every block in New York City.
Bill Helmreich walked every block of New York City―6,000 miles in all―to write the award-winning The New York Nobody Knows. Later, he re-walked Brooklyn―some 816 miles―to write this one-of-a-kind walking guide to the city’s hottest borough. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he had with residents during his block-by-block journeys, The Brooklyn Nobody Knows captures the heart and soul of a diverse, booming, and constantly changing borough that defines cool around the world. The guide covers every one of Brooklyn’s forty-four neighborhoods, from Greenpoint to Coney Island, providing a colorful portrait of each section’s most interesting, unusual, and unknown people, places, and things. Along the way you will learn about a Greenpoint park devoted to plants and trees that produce materials used in industry; a hornsmith who practices his craft in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens; a collection of 1,140 stuffed animals hanging from a tree in Bergen Beach; a five-story Brownsville mural that depicts Zionist leader Theodor Herzl―and that was the brainchild of black teenagers; Brooklyn’s most private―yet public―beach in Manhattan Beach; and much, much more.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3CdtxOX.
The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn
by Ellen Levitt
The ‘Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn’ is a photographic essay of these ex-shuls; what happened to them, and how they appear today.
“Jewish life in Brownsville, East New York, Flatbush-East Flatbush, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other nearby areas of Brooklyn through the 1950s was a lively, rich and varied environment. Over the next few decades it dissipated greatly. As Jews moved to other areas, they left behind their synagogues. The ‘Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn’ is a photographic essay of these ex-shuls; what happened to them, and how they appear today. Many became churches whose facades still have Jewish symbols.
The book offers photographs, interviews and analysis on ninety-one of these former Jewish houses of worship. Some have been faithfully preserved while others are in disrepair. Described in the book are memories of Jews who belonged to these old congregations as well as the Christians who now fill the pews. All this is supported by extensive research and stirring stories…”
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3QxcVa5.
Going Back to Brooklyn
by Martin L. Blumberg
In reading “Going Back To Brooklyn,” you get the experience once again, of your fond childhood memories of that greatest era.
Martin L. Blumberg’s first book ” My Brooklyn, My Way,” released in January, 2020 at the start of the pandemic has received rave reviews and chosen #46 for being one of the best books written about Brooklyn.
In his latest book, “Going Back To Brooklyn,” you would get the experience once again, of your fond childhood memories of that greatest era.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3L5ZIE2
Filmed In Brooklyn
by Margo Donohue
“Shooting in Brooklyn is like opening a time capsule. Nothing has changed. Everything looks like it did in the eighties.” – Freddie Prinze, Jr.
Discover the iconic films, legendary personalities and the locations for timeless big screen moments that took place in Brooklyn. From Saturday Night Fever to numerous Spike Lee Joints, readers can learn about Brooklyn’s cinematic past or discover locations to visit today.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3BQA0Ak
My Brooklyn ... Your Brooklyn
by Kevin J. Leddy
“Let me just say that if you took two people who grew up in different neighborhoods in Brooklyn and sat them down in a room together they could talk for hours on end and basically share the same stories as if they grew up right next door to each other.
You see that is why I am writing this book. The stories that I will share with you as you turn each page do not belong to me exclusively. They are YOUR stories just as much as they are mine. All you really have to do is change the names and faces and use your own neighborhood as their back drop and believe me they are yours. I have included after each story an empty page for you to put your story on it so it will become “Your Brooklyn “ and a journal to pass on to those who you wish to remember your story.”
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3qM8jll
Tales of Brooklyn
by Stan Fischler
“Tales of Brooklyn” is a collection of humorous and poignant stories that gives a fascinating glimpse of growing up in New York City during the Depression and WWII eras. Fischler’s intimate circle of family and friends will shape him into the Hall of Fame hockey writer that he becomes.”
Every hero must have an origin story, and that includes New York media icon Stan Fischler. Known by millions of sports fans as “The Maven,” Fischler has written over 100 books on hockey, baseball, and transit systems―now he turns to his own story. Fischler has written for national publications, met celebrities, and co-produced an award-winning documentary. But before all this, he was just a simple New York kid speeding around on his Roadmaster, riding the Coney Island Cyclone, and watching a double feature at the Kismet every Saturday.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3xAbosW
Brooklyn Then and Now
by Marcia Reiss
Brooklyn Then and Now® provides a visual chronicle of the city’s past Brooklyn possesses a rich history and culture. The Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Dodgers, and Coney Island are icons as well known as Manhattan’s skyline.
Brooklyn Then and Now illustrates this vibrant, ever changing borough’s transformations. In 1898, despite fierce opposition from their political leaders, local residents voted by a slim margin to give up their independence and join the great consolidation of boroughs that formed New York City. The new borough maintained its own identity, however, its residents taking pride in calling themselves “Brooklynites,” a special breed of New Yorkers. Descendants of 19th-century immigrants keep up the ethnic traditions that have characterized Brooklyn neighborhoods for generations.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3dltNmJ
Walking Brooklyn: 30 walking tours exploring historical legacies, neighborhood culture, side streets, and waterways
The Last Years of the Brooklyn Dodgers
by Rudy Marzano
This work, which picks up where the author’s previous book, The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s (McFarland, 2005), left off, covers the Dodgers’ final eight years in Brooklyn.
The Chapters carry the reader from the 1951 playoffs, when a late season collapse and Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” dealt Brooklyn a heartbreaking blow, through the 1955 World Series title, and finally to Walter O’Malley’s controversial decision to move the team to Los Angeles. The author covers each season in-depth and assesses popular perceptions of the Dodgers, their players and owners, and considers O’Malley’s culpability in the team’s departure, which ended a string of 74 years in which Brooklyn had major league baseball.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3UqFkl5.
Brooklyn: The Once and Future City
by Jonathan Rider
What accounts for the precarious state of liberalism in the mid-1980s? Why was the Republican Party able to steal away so many ethnic Democrats of modest means in recent presidential elections?
Jonathan Rieder explores these questions in his powerful study of the Jews and Italians of Canarsie, a middle-income community that was once the scene of a wild insurgency against racial busing. Proud bootstrappers, the children of immigrants, Canarsians may speak with piquant New York accents, but their story has a more universal appeal. Canarsie is Middle America, Brooklyn-style.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3dCHg9z.
My Brooklyn, My Way: From Brownsville to Canarsie in the 1950s
by Martin Lewis Blumberg
There must be something in our souls that cries out to explain to the world not only who we are but also how it was we got to be the person our friends and family know and love.
For Martin Blumberg, the path of explaining himself to the world begins by understanding the way the world around him influenced his experiences and choices and how he interacted with family, friends, teachers, and neighborhood businesses as he grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. What puzzles us all is the mystery of how the kids we grew up with in those same surroundings went on to become either well-educated and respected professionals and businessmen, or gangsters and incarcerated criminals.
If you’d like to purchase this book through Amazon, please do so by using this link: https://amzn.to/3ByDbez.
Courtesy of Steven Lasky, museumoffamilyhistory.com