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.
In this presentation, Professor Dash Moore will show a wide variety of photographs which document 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.
Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History
Director, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies
University of Michigan
Deborah Dash Moore is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. From 2005 to 2015, she served as Director of the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies. Prior to coming to the University of Michigan, she was Professor of Religion on the William R. Kenan Chair at Vassar College. An historian of American Jews, she specializes in twentieth century urban history. Three of her monographs form a trilogy, moving from studying second-generation New York Jews (At Home in America) to examining the lives of Jewish American soldiers in World War II, and culminating in a history of migration that carried big city Jews to Miami and Los Angeles after the war (To the Golden Cities). Her book, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, served as the basis for a documentary of the same title. Most recently, she has explored the formative encounter of Jews and American cities in the Urban Origins of American Judaism, and written a comprehensive history of New York Jews, Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a People and a City. Her new book, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-Century New York (2023), extends her interest in urban Jewish history to photography. She has also edited or co-edited three books in addition to the three-volume City of Promises: A History of New York Jews. Currently she serves as editor in chief of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of original sources translated into English from the biblical period to 2005, selected by leading scholars.