Jonathan Goldman
Jonathan Ezra Goldman ’94 published his fourth book, Hidden Histories of jazz Age New York from the Suppressed to the Strange (Suny Press Excelsior Editions, May 2026). The book chronicles overlooked communities and cultural revolutions of 1920s NYC, people and struggles that have been pushed to the margins of history.
Hidden Histories of jazz Age New York offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. Sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform are seen through the individual experiences of librarians, cops, shopkeepers, sexworkers, ragpickers, and antivaxxers that counter the era’s popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. Jonathan Ezra Goldman’s whirlwind tour of 1920s NYC visits an all-female police platoon, a Black amusement park shut down before it opened, an Arabic literary salon, socialist Puerto Rican cigar factories, Chinatown funerals, lesbian cafes, toxic dumps, and Ku Klux Klan recruitment offices. Little-known anecdotes about well-known figures such as Marcus Garvey, Dorothy Parker, and Babe Ruth serve as a backdrop to a city beset by housing shortages, traffic chaos, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased histories of injustices like white supremacist attacks, raids on gay bath houses, and mass deportations. These stories still resonate today, testifying that this dizzying, exuberant ride through hidden history can help twenty-first readers see our own moment and its problems more clearly.
As Hugh Ryan (When Brooklyn Was Queer) writes, Hidden Histories “explores the lives of figures who have, because of their race, gender, sexuality, or immigration status, been sidelined in our history books as much (or more) than they were in their own time.” Jonathan Mahler, author of The Gods of New York, calls the book “a wonder and a delight [that] deserves a prominent place on any shelf of enduring works of New York City history.”
