FCUCC Book Group

The Book Group will convene on Tuesday, September 14 for an online discussion beginning at 4:30pm. 

The selection for September is the non-fiction "Our Crowd": The Great Jewish Families of New York by Stephen Birmingham. It was published in 1967 and appeared on the NY Times best-seller list for 47 weeks. 

This book chronicles the lives of selected individuals, all German Jews, who immigrated to America in the early- to mid-1800s. These men generally started with very little and worked their way up and into the financial world of New York City. They were also among the leaders of the Jewish community in New York during the Gilded Age (1880s and 1890s). They knew they would never be invited into the social world of the Astors, so they created their own. 

This book is a departure from our usual fictional selections, but the author made sure it would not be a dull read. In describing the Warburg brothers, he writes: “Felix, like his name, had a happy face, and his mustache curled upward. His brother Paul had a sad face, and his mustache turned down.”

Birmingham also wrote two other books about groups of Jewish immigrants:  The Grandees: The Story of America’s Sephardic Elite (who arrived earlier than the Seligmans, Lehmans and Guggenheims), and The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews (who came later). 

It’s OK to join the discussion group even if you haven’t finished the book. (The Audible version is especially well-narrated, by the way.)