Shulman, Irving, (The Amboy Dukes [originally published in 1947, hc, Buccaneer Books, 2000]) 978- 1568497358 [pb, Pocket Books, 1971] 978-0671774134 [See related film] [The novel is set early in the summer of 1944 in the primarily Jewish neighbourhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn. The wartime economic boom forces parents into working long hours and overtime shifts at local munitions plants and the Navy Base. Neglected by their busy parents, local teenagers are left to fend for themselves. They seek identity, protection, and status by forming violent street gangs like the Amboy Dukes. The narrative centers on Frank Goldfarb, a 16-year-old Jewish youth drifting away from school and moral constraints. Along with his volatile friends, including Benny Semmel and “Crazy” Sachs, Frank dives headfirst into the gang culture of the Dukes. The gang’s daily routine consists of cutting class, smoking marijuana reefers, committing petty robberies, and engaging in brutal street brawls with rival territory gangs. The gang’s reckless lifestyle spirals out of control during a confrontation with a high school teacher. In a moment of panic and escalating aggression, two of the gang members accidentally kill the teacher.
United States · Fiction author
Irving Shulman
Irving Shulman (1913–1995, born in New York City, died in Sherman Oaks, CA) [ - He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, focusing on literature, philosophy, education and social sciences. Later in life, he completed a doctorate in English literature at UCLA. Served in the US Army in World War II in an educational writing role in Washington, D.C. He achieved massive commercial success with his debut novel, The Amboy Dukes (1947), whose primary characters were Jewish. The book offered a shocking, sociological look at the grim, and sometimes short, lives of teenage street criminals in Brooklyn (where Shulman grew up) during World War II. It sold five million copies and led to his being hired as a screenwriter by Warner Bros. Two subsequent novels, Cry Tough! and The Big Brokers, followed the equally grim experiences of some of the characters who survived The Amboy Dukes, with decreasing emphasis on their being Jewish. Post-WWII American Jewish literature frequently focused on rapid assimilation, educational attainment, and middle-class success. Shulman’s trilogy aggressively pushed back against this narrative. He proved that the squalor of urban tenements could produce Jewish social deviance just as easily as it did with any other marginalized immigrant group.
Through this trilogy, Irving Shulman built a unique space in the “Jews and Crime” genre by delivering a tragedy of assimilation. While mainstream post-war Jewish literature celebrated the community’s move from tenements into universities and suburban professional life, Shulman documented the parallel, dark pipeline from the tenements straight into American criminality. Shulman completely avoids the romanticism found in later epics like The Godfather or Once Upon a Time in America. His thesis across all three books remains unwavering: crime does not pay. The characters’ rejection of their families’ traditional ethics does not make them powerful magnates; it turns them into disposable cogs in a violent machine that chews them up and spits them out.
Moving to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, Shulman became a successful contract screenwriter. He is most famously credited with writing the original story treatment for the iconic James Dean film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955). He also penned the official novelization of West Side Story (1961). In the 1960s, he transitioned into writing highly successful, albeit controversial, celebrity biographies of Hollywood figures like Jean Harlow and Rudolph Valentino. Alongside writing, he taught at George Washington University and Cal State Los Angeles. – Google/AI]
Note on Shulman’s authorship of the West Side Story novel (1961): He was commissioned to write the tie-in novel because of his unmatched literary track record with urban delinquency. With The Amboy Dukes, Shulman had already written the definitive postwar novel on teenage street gangs, neighborhood tribalism, and the generational collapse of immigrant households. He knew exactly how to translate street slang, juvenile posturing, and localized turf wars into compelling prose. Even though the musical had pivoted away from its original Jewish vs. Catholic (East Side Story) premise, Shulman’s understanding of ethnic friction remained highly relevant. His career-defining theme—how second-generation American youths abandon the traditions of their immigrant parents to find an abusive, surrogate family on the streets—aligned with the thematic core of West Side Story. This recapitulated the erasure of Jewish settings and characters, and their replacement by other ethnic groups, in the movie adaptation of The Amboy Dukes over 10 years earlier, though for somewhat different purposes. – Google/AI] See note on City Across the River (1949) in the companion Filmography.]
Paralyzed by fear of the electric chair, the boys scramble to hide their involvement while the authorities launch an investigation. Trust evaporates within the Dukes. Paranoid and desperate, the group begins turning on itself. The cycle of violence peaks during a chaotic, tragic assault at a community gang dance. The characters are ultimately unable to escape the consequences of their actions, leading to a grim, un-romanticized ending where youthful mistakes solidify into lifetime criminal records or premature death.
Shulman aggressively critiques the lack of parental oversight, ineffective school systems, and the collateral damage of a war economy on home life. Despite the temporary financial relief of wartime jobs, the characters remain physically and socially trapped in the tenements of Brownsville. Unlike later Hollywood depictions of troubled youth, Shulman offers a deeply pessimistic view. Adolescent rage is not solved by understanding adults; it naturally hardens into permanent delinquency and moral decay. Shulman consciously demystifies the “tough Jew” stereotype of Jewish criminals. The Amboy Dukes are not calculating criminal masterminds or glamorous mafiosi. Instead, they are deeply insecure, uneducated, and reckless teenagers. Their criminality is defined by petty thefts, zip guns, and a botched, accidental murder.
Upon release, the book was considered shocking and outré for its explicit depictions of teenage sex, drug use, and casual brutality, leading to it being banned from multiple schools. It became a massive cultural phenomenon and best-seller. – Google/AI]
Shulman, Irving, (Cry Tough! (hc, Avon Publishing, 1949)) [pb, iUniverse, 2000] 978-0595144853 [The second novel follows Mitch Wolf, a former leader of the Dukes, as he is released from the Elmira Reformatory. Mitch genuinely wants to “go straight,” return to his loving, traditional family, and marry a nice Jewish girl named Dorothy. However, the economic reality of working a low-wage job vs. the flashy, lucrative allure of a local crime syndicate pulls him right back into the criminal lifestyle.
The book serves as an “occupational novel” of the post-WWII Jewish working class. The traditional, stabilizing values of the Jewish immigrant home are depicted as completely powerless against the forces of modern American materialism. Mitch’s family is decent, but their poverty makes their lifestyle look suffocating compared to the wealth of the mob. Mitch is physically and morally torn between two archetypes. On one side is Dorothy, representing domestic stability, Jewish community continuity, and honest labor. On the other is Joyce, a manipulative woman tied to criminal elements who represents carnal temptation and lawlessness. Mitch’s ultimate failure to choose Dorothy signifies his permanent exile from the respectable Jewish mainstream.
Just like the first book, when Hollywood adapted Cry Tough into a 1959 film starring John Saxon, the Jewish component was stripped entirely. The filmmakers transposed the story onto a completely different demographic, changing the characters into Puerto Rican immigrants and relocating the action to Spanish Harlem. This actually foreshadowed a process which West Side Story experienced shortly afterward. – Google/AI]
Shulman, Irving, (The Big Brokers (hc, The Dial Press, 1951)) [pb, iUniverse, 2000] 978-0595141449 [In the third book, the narrative expands drastically. Mitch Wolf, along with former Dukes Larry Tunig and Bull Benson, are sent west by the “big brokers” of the East Coast Syndicate to run the fictional Rivera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The metamorphosis of the former young, neighbourhood petty criminals into crime business executives is completed. In Las Vegas, the explicitly Jewish nature of the characters’ upbringing is drastically muted. This is not an accident of Shulman’s writing; it is a thematic point. In the corporate, cold world of the national crime syndicate, ethnic identity is ironed out in favor of corporate utility. The boys are no longer street-corner Jewish toughs; they are suited mid-level executives in a transnational criminal enterprise. Shulman uses the syndicate as a dark mirror of corporate America. For these Brownsville boys, organized crime becomes their twisted vehicle for achieving the American Dream—wealth, luxury, and geographic mobility away from the ghetto. However, this “assimilation” requires the total abandonment of their moral heritage, ultimately leading to their psychological and physical destruction. – Google/AI]
Shulman, Irving, (The Devil’s Knee (hc, Trident Press, 1973)) 978-0671270926 [pb, iUniverse, 2000] 978-0595141463 [Published over two decades after the original trilogy, The Devil’s Knee (1973) serves as a cynical, darkly satirical epilogue to the saga of the Amboy Dukes. The book catches up with the surviving, aging members of the gang—Larry “Tunafish” Tunig and Simon “Bull” Bronstein—who have spent the last 18 years hiding in Mexico City. The narrative ignites when the East Coast crime syndicate forces them out of hiding and relocates them to a luxury mansion in Beverly Hills, California. Larry is ordered to marry Joyce, the widow of a major mob boss, to act as a front, keep the press away, and manage her out-of-control, rock-star-aspiring daughter. In this final installment, Shulman’s exploration of Jews and crime undergoes a radical shift from tragic realism to an absurdist examination of guilt, generational trauma, and American prosperity.
The most striking Jewish evolution in the book belongs to Simon “Bull” Bronstein. In his youth, Simon was the muscle—a violent, unthinking thug. In exile, however, he is completely consumed by crippling remorse for his past misdeeds. He entirely sheds his street moniker “Bull” and demands to be called by his Hebrew birth name, Simon. He grows a traditional beard and spends his days attending daily services at the local synagogue, seeking spiritual absolution for the blood on his hands. Simon’s commitment to Jewish pacifism is put to the test on the streets of Los Angeles. When a street-corner antisemitic orator begins spouting hate speech, Simon snaps—brutally attacking and maiming the speaker. This reveals that his deeply ingrained “Tough Jew” violent impulses are only barely contained beneath his religious veneer.
While The Big Brokers showed crime as a vehicle for geographic mobility, The Devil’s Knee shows the ultimate destination of that trajectory: the wealthy Jewish suburbs of Southern California. Living in Beverly Hills, Larry and Simon are physically insulated from the squalor of Brownsville. However, Shulman demonstrates that luxury cannot erase their origins. Their wealth is built on a foundation of historical violence, and they remain prisoners of the syndicate. Larry’s forced marriage to Joyce (a non-Jewish former Las Vegas sex worker) and his role as a stepfather to her chaotic, counter-culture daughter emphasize a total break from traditional Jewish family continuity. The generational transmission of Jewish identity is completely dead, replaced by the vapid demands of American celebrity culture and the music industry.
The Google/AI commentary on Shulman’s trilogy positions it within the changing depiction of organized crime in American culture, from the gritty realism of the 1930s to its repackaging as pop-culture entertainment by the 1970s, as in The Godfather series. The Devil’s Knee directly contrasts the old-school, disciplined violence of the Jewish mobsters with the chaotic, drug-addled nihilism of 1970s youth culture. In one absurd climax, a crew of Tommy-gun-wielding mobsters has to defend Larry and Simon’s mansion from a group of radicalized, drug-crazed hippies attempting to blow it up.
Through The Devil’s Knee, Shulman concludes his commentary on the Jewish criminal trajectory. The Jewish street toughs did not become the respected community patriarchs their immigrant parents hoped they would be, nor did they remain terrifying underworld kingpins. Instead, they became tired, paranoid old men hiding behind suburban gates, trapped between the crushing weight of religious guilt and a surreal, modern America that views their violent history as a mere novelty. – Google/AI]