Now that Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist (the kiss of death, alas, in American politics) has declared his candidacy for president, perhaps Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers will reenter the zeitgeist and receive the attention it so richly deserves, Senator Sanders, in many respects, is the latter-day representative of the social, political and cultural milieu Mr. Howe so thoroughly and affectionately documents in this fine book.

When Eastern European Jews began departing their homelands in the late-nineteenth century, they carried with them the communitarian traditions of the shtetl. Unsurprisingly, these traditions were expressed in and as socialist politics. Much of the political--as well as social and cultural--ferment Eastern European Jews aroused occurred on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (which, after reading this book, I'll look at differently and appreciate even more). When the Williamsburg Bridge went up in 1903, connecting Delancey Street on the Lower East Side with Havemeyer Street in Brooklyn, many of these recently arrived immigrants moved across the East River to Williamsburg, where many of their descendants remain. Bernie Sanders, whose father's family perished in the Holocaust, was born in Brooklyn in 1941. He attended James Madison High School on Bedford Avenue, and there he led the track team.

Irving Howe was a lifelong socialist; the documentary film "Arguing the World" is a very nice biography of Mr. Howe and his erstwhile classmates at the City College of New York (known at one time as "the Harvard of the proletariat"), Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol. The film nicely documents the various intellectual trajectories these four sons of the Lower East Side traveled along. One of the primary themes of World of Our Fathers concerns the doctrinal squabbles among the Jewish socialists on the Lower East Side.

Along the way, Mr. Howe presents detailed and fascinating analyses of Yiddish culture and its effect on broader American culture. He does a particularly nice job of explicating Yiddish humor, and its exponents like Henny Youngman, Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield, and the extent to which it influenced comedians of all stripes. I found myself wondering what Irving Howe would make of latter-day borscht belt comedians like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.

This is an exceptional work of scholarship that it is imbued with Mr. Howe's (born, incidentally, as Irving Hohenstein) obvious affinity with and a fondness for the subject. For some reason, it took me 25 years too get around to reading this book. If the subject of the immigration of Eastern European Jews to the United States, and the influence of those new citizens on American culture and society interests you in any way, I very highly recommend this book--as well as what is arguably its companion, Our Crowd by Stephen Birmingham.

Immensely detailed portrait of the New York East Side Jewish community, with lots of information about the adjustment and assimilation of the immigrant Jews into all aspects of the city's urban life and interesting information about the Yiddish culture. It's unfortunate (as the author acknowledges in his introduction) that despite the broad title, the book focuses so much on New York to the exclusion of other cities. The section on Yiddish culture also included a good deal of literary criticism, which would have been more meaningful if I'd already been familiar with the writers being discussed and then agree with or take issue with the author's judgments. Still worth a read for anyone interested in Jewish history as long as you keep these things in mind. ( )

Thank you, Irving Howe, for doing lots of research so that I could read about it. ( )

I'm giving this book only two stars because even though the title includes the phrase "The Journey of the East European Jews to America" there appears to be nothing about any place other than New York, and possibly some other U.S. cities. A great many Jews emigrated to Canada (particularly Montreal), Mexico, Argentina, etc. All "America".The first section, describing conditions in Eastern Europe, motivations for emigrating, and the journeys through Europe and across the Atlantic, is great. That's only about 50 pages out of a 700 page book. ( )

3137. World of Our Fathers, by Irving Howe. (read Dec 17, 1998) This is a 1976 book I have long considered reading and finally did. Its jacket subtitle--not repeated on the title page--is "The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made." This is a great sociological study--I was surprised to find it so interesting, since a sociology course I took in college bored me to tears--and is about a world so different from my rural, Catholic background. Some parts of the book did not interest me--the Yiddish theater is no great interest of mine, for instance--but reading the book was an experience and most worthwhile. How many people in this country still speak Yiddish as a first language, does anyone know? How many still speak it? ( )