A Jew arrives at Israel’s Haifa port, trying to smuggle two bags of coffee. “What do you have in the bag?” the customs officers ask him. “Bird feed,” he replies. “Since when do birds eat coffee?” “They’ll eat it if they want; if they don’t, they won’t.” Jewish bootlegging has not only provided material for…
Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition By Marni Davis NYU Press, 272 pages, $32 Sociologist Nathan Glazer has written that “a people’s relation to alcohol represents something very deep about it.” That this statement rings especially true for Jews is the premise of University of Georgia professor Marni Davis’s new book,…
In the 1920s, at the height of Prohibition, underground saloons called speakeasies proliferated around the country. They got their name — according to an 1891 New York Times article — from one Kate Hester, who ran such a saloon in her Pennsylvania home, and who was known for telling her customers to “speak easy” when…
In 1908, in Shreveport, La., a black man named Charles Colman was charged with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old white girl. Colman was drunk, and, a reporter for Collier’s implied, had likely been drinking something called “Black Cock Vigor Gin,” which featured a picture of a nude white woman on its label, along…
If you drown a Jew while trying to baptize him against his will, are you anti-Semitic? That was the discussion brewing in the blogosphere after the penultimate episode of the HBO hit series “Boardwalk Empire” aired on November 28. The show, set in the 1920s in Atlantic City, follows the people who run the city…
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