Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York

by Deborah Dash Moore

In the middle of the twentieth century, good cameras became smaller and lighter, enabling street photographers to roam alleyways, ride elevated trains and subways, and stroll beaches in summertime to capture daily life with urgency and intimacy. Walkers in the City showcases the distinctive urban vision that working-class Jewish photographers produced with these new cameras on New York City's streets and in public spaces. Drawing on the experiences of and photographs by a generation of young Jewish photographers who belonged to the New York Photo League, Deborah Dash Moore offers a new perspective on New York as seen through their eyes―a cityscape of working-class people and democratizing public transit. With their cameras, they pictured Gotham's abrasive social milieu and its evanescent textures and light, creating an archive of vernacular images of city life and a distinctive tradition of street photography that would be widely imitated. Walkers in the City documents how these roving, imaginative New Yorkers, entranced by the medium of photography, transformed everyday sights into rousing, joyous, and poignant moments of time, creating visual poetry out of the fabric of social life.

Genres: Photography, History

304 pages, Hardcover

Published September 15, 2023

About the author

Deborah Dash Moore (born 1946, in New York City) is the former Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Moore taught for many years at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. While there she served intermittently as head of Religious Studies and helped found a program in Jewish Studies. At Vassar, Deborah Dash Moore wrote and co-edited numerous books, articles and collections. She was a highly regarded educator and classroom professor in addition to her scholarship.

Her first book, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (1981), explores how the children of immigrants created an ethnic world that blended elements of Jewish and American culture into a vibrant urban society. To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L. A. (1994) follows those big city Jews who chose to move to new homes after World War II and examines the type of communities and politics that flourished in these rapidly growing centers.

Issues of leadership, authority and accomplishment have also engaged her attention, first in B'nai B'rith and the Challenge of Ethnic Leadership (1981), and more recently in the award-winning two-volume Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997), which she edited with Paula Hyman.

Her 2004 book, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, charts the lives of fifteen young Jewish men as they faced military service and tried to make sense of its demands, simultaneously wrestling with what it meant to be an American and a Jew. GI Jews, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, is a powerful, intimate portrayal of the costs of a conflict that was at once physical, emotional, and spiritual.

In 2008, Moore published American Jewish Identity Politics (University of Michigan), a collection of essays by such notable Jewish studies scholars as Hasia Diner, Jonathan Sarna, and Paula Hyman.

In 2011, her book Gender & Jewish History (Indiana University Press), written with co-editor Marion Kaplan in honor of historian Paula Hyman, was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Anthologies and Collections.

In September 2012, NYU Press published a three-volume series edited by Moore, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York. This history was selected for the National Jewish Book Award.

Reviews

[Judy Goldstein]

This book had all my favorite words. Coney Island. Photography. New York City. Leftists. Gendered spaces. Urban solidarity. Elevated trains. Intimacy. Cityscape. Democratizing public transit. To name a few

[Katie Magee]

Throughout Walkers in the City, Deborah Dash Moore examines how photographers used the people of New York City to reveal both the individual, personal experience of urban life and the larger world surrounding them. Faces appear in the majority of the photographs in the book Walkers in the City by Deborah Dash Moore. Faces are what we see, how we feel the subject’s emotions, how we seek glimpses into what they are thinking, and how we understand their situation in their world. What is so intriguing throughout this book is how the photographers approached photographing faces. Vivian Cherry’s 1948 photograph, Antionette, shows a young girl holding onto a street parking signpost on a rainy city day while blowing an impressively large gum bubble. There are no other faces in focus in this image. As Moore explains in her book Walkers in the City, the photo was taken by Cherry “as part of a story on a summer camp for working-class New York kids.” (153) What we see is a photo taken from a distance emphasizing this girl, her face blowing the bubble, and her identity as a child of working-class parents. Other photographers in this book brought the camera much closer to individual faces, as seen in Louis Faurer’s photograph, which is not an appropriate title, Deaf Mutes from 1950. This photo intensely zooms in on a young woman and a man in conversation, communicating through lip-reading. Uniquely, the world falls away behind the young woman. All we see in focus is her face, expression, the man’s hand, and the back of his head. Her face is illuminated and pulls us in; there is less to see and digest than in Cherry’s photograph, but each still emphasizes the individuals’ faces, identities, and expressions. The overwhelming majority of photographs in the book use faces to convey New York’s identity. Still, few explore ways to remove the personal element and emphasize the external vs. internal worlds seen by NYC residents. Lisette Model’s photograph, First Reflection from 1940, interestingly focuses on a man looking into a shop window but shows no face. This man, wearing a hat, is balanced by a hat being sold in the shop, while an S from a sign covers his face. His silhouette stands tall against the window, but fades as we see key elements of NYC street life: hotels, shops, sidewalks, and a ferry building. These three photographs demonstrate the unique approach each photographer takes to photographing, showing, and displaying people, either from a respectful distance, up close and personal, or by removing an individual’s identity, expressions, and face altogether. Over all, Walkers in the City allows readers to find connecting themes across photographs that may initially appear very different, revealing how each photographer’s approach to faces, identity, and the surrounding city contributes to a larger understanding of life in New York City.

[S]

This is a really wonderfully written ode to New York City by the incomparable Deborah Dash Moore. Anyone who is interested in photography, New York City, the Postwar era in urban environments, or Jewish culture would do well to get a copy of this book. The publishers also did a fantastic job and the images are great to look through.

[Edie Lee]

An impressive array of Jewish street photographers from New York are featured on these pages. The examples are stunning. The book highlights individual artists as well as cooperatives such as the Photo League and the Feature group.

The text has some good insights and descriptions, but the author made way too much unfounded commentary. It would have been better to let the pictures speak for themselves.

[Jessica]

Walkers in the City offers a thoughtful exploration of street photography as both an artistic practice and a historical record. Deborah Dash Moore skillfully reveals how photographers documented the rhythm of everyday life while capturing the evolving cultural landscape of midcentury New York. It is an engaging work for readers interested in history, photography, and urban life.

[KA]

Utterly absorbing and beautiful book. Made me want to grill my grandfather about his experiences growing up in the neighborhood of Coney Island. Would make an incredible gift.