Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

A Jewish Mob Tour

Max “Kid Twist” Zwerbach, “Big” Jack Zelig, Monk Eastman. These aren’t the Jewish historical figures you study in Hebrew school.

All three were notorious gangsters from the early-20th-century ramshackle days of the Lower East Side. And now they’re being commemorated in the “Jewish Mob Walking Tour,” organized by the Museum of the American Gangster in New York.

Currently in previews, the tour — which gives the Forward a shout out for its influential role in the Jewish community — takes participants to a slew of sordid locales, including shootout and assassination sites. It’s not all blood and bullets, though. Curated with the help of crime authors like Patrick Downey, author of “Gangster City,” the tour hopes to contextualize the Jewish mob within the broader Jewish immigrant experience — not all enterprise was good enterprise.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.