Observations and Further Questions

Much can be learned by examining the assembled body of information on the Jewish interaction with crime and espionage, both in reality and in published fiction. Doing so hopefully points to directions for future research, in our never-ending fascination with analyzing and explaining ourselves (not that you have to be Jewish or a criminal or a spy to be interested). Let’s get started.

2.1 Age

The age of authors in the mystery/thriller genre, compared to other genres, tends to be somewhat older, starting out somewhere in the latter 40s. The reasons cited include the fact that many began writing only after careers in law, journalism, policing, medicine, intelligence, etc., have equipped them with the relevant experience and expertise.

The present sample confirms that, only more so. There is a sharp generational fault line among the authors, who are overwhelmingly advanced in age and not being replenished proportionately by younger writers entering the field. I took as an arbitrary criterion the age of 50, i.e. birth-year 1976, and looked at the authors older and younger than that age. Of 206 American authors, only 13 are 50 or younger, 56 are deceased, and 137 are older, most of them a lot older. Among the Israeli authors, there were 8 younger, 12 deceased, and 55 older. Among the British, it was 2 under 50, 8 deceased (including several 19^th-century authors), and 11 older. Among the Canadians, 3 deceased, none under 50, and 11 older. Among the International group (including 15 born more than 100 years ago), 26 deceased, 3 under 50, and 29 older.

Is this perhaps a faulty sample, under-representing younger authors who need more time to become recognized and established, and whom I may therefore have missed? Maybe in part. But it rather seems to reflect the changes in the socioeconomic and occupational structure of Jews in the various countries over the last 50-100 years.

Early 20^th-century Jewry was far more proletarian and blue-collar in its class structure, and produced many more tailors, taxi drivers and regular cops, criminals, professional athletes and union organizers. Over time, as more Jews entered white-collar and professional jobs, their crime patterns did not disappear, but rather evolved in tandem. Unlike mobsters of some other ethnic groups, the Jewish ones did not usually welcome their offspring into the family business, preferring to encourage their entry into middle-class, law-abiding lifestyles and occupations. On this subject, see for example books by Rich Cohen (“Tough Jews”), Stephen Birmingham (“The Rest of Us”), Jenna Weissman Joselit (“Our Gang”) and Robert Rockaway (“But He Was Good To His Mother”). All are referenced in the companion non-fiction bibliography on histories and biographies of American Jewish detectives and criminals.

Today’s Jewish criminals are mostly of the white collar variety, rather than direct heirs of Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Abe Reles. Jonathan Stone’s amusing book, “The Prison Minyan”, referenced in the U.S. fiction bibliography, illustrates the point. Here are some of the crimes for which the Jewish convicts in that book were serving time: embezzlement of synagogue funds; tax evasion and funeral fraud; polygamy; art forgery; bribery; insurance fraud, etc. The non-fiction bibliography of American criminals, detectives, etc. lists numerous books about Lansky, Siegel, Rothstein and the others but also seven volumes on Madoff (by Behar, Campbell, Eren, Henriques, Kirtzman, Brian Ross and Weinstein).

If this reasoning is correct, it explains a great deal about the life experiences and therefore the subjects that seem to preoccupy younger Jewish authors these days. Their gradual distancing from the mystery/thriller genre may be inevitable, rendering much of the present discussion of historical rather than current applicability. Or maybe a new wave of Jewish crime/espionage fiction of the white-collar, corporate and “techno” variety is on its way.

There is not much mention or awareness of the famous American Jewish gangster personalities of the first half of the 20^th century in the body of literature under consideration. Only 10% of the authors in our sample make any reference at all to them, and basically none of the authors outside the American group. In one recurring pattern, the protagonist is a grandchild or other relation of a Jewish gangster or hitman of the earlier generation, sometimes only discovering that fact by chance, and then dealing with its implications. The echoes of the “Kosher Mafia” or “Kosher Nostra” legacy are a decidedly minority phenomenon for the authors in our sample, though they make for good entertainment. Some examples:

David Black, (“An Impossible Life: A Bobeh Myseh”)

Michael Chabon, (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”)

Zev Chafets, (“Inherit the Mob”)

Joan Lipinsky Cochran, (“The Yiddish Gangster’s Daughter”)

Max Allan Collins, (“Neon Mirage”)

Phillip DePoy (“Cold Florida”)

Eric Dezenhall (“The Devil Himself”)

Jason Diamond (“Kaplan’s Plot”)

E.L. Doctorow, (”Billy Bathgate”)

Bruce J. Friedman (“Mr. Siegel”)

Michael Gold (“Jews Without Money”)

Tod Goldberg (“Gangsterland” Trilogy)

Harry Grey, (“Portrait of a Mobster”)

David Hazan (“Kosher Mafia”)

Gregg Keizer “The Longest Night”)

Zachary Lazar (“I Pity the Poor Immigrant”)

Lily Barrish Levner, (“Banquets & Bootleg Bounty”)

Richard Parrish, (“Nothing But The Truth”)

Eileen Pollack, (“The Bible of Dirty Jokes”)

Thane Rosenbaum, (“How Sweet It Is!”)

Michael Simon, (“The Last Jew Standing”)

2.2 Gender

Going back to the early 20^th century, there were many more male crime authors than female ones, though this evened out over the years and evolved into a certain female majority today. And there was a sort of thematic division of labour as well. Male authors strongly dominated the noir, tough detective end of the genre, following precedents of authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. Military-political-espionage-techno thrillers followed a similar pattern. Female authors were more associated with the “cozy” end of the genre, characterized by gentler tones; minimal-to-no violence, sex and profanity; amateur rather than professional sleuths; and smaller, more intimate settings with fewer suspects. Think: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. The men were more stereotypically macho, cynical, hard-bitten types (think: Humphrey Bogart); the women protagonists were more often sharp-tongued, clever at connecting the dots and perceiving clues, calmly restoring order and providing comforting, happy endings.

These stereotypes have given way to a greater degree of gender parity nowadays, though earlier patterns to some extent remain. Male authors in our sample outnumber the female ones in a ratio of about 2.7:1, actually 270:99, with five mixed-couple author duos (Brill, Ephron, Lockridge, Rosen and Zerries – all Americans) left out of the count. And how about the ratio of male to female main protagonists? Male authors continue to dominate the noir end of the spectrum, and female authors the cozy end, but there are also numerous “crossovers”. Here for example is a short list of some of the female noir protagonists in our sample, all of them American:

• Shlomit Beck’s Officer Helen Barry of the Los Angeles Police Department;
• Elizabeth Cosin’s Zen Moses, a hard-boiled, cigar-smoking private investigator;
• Phillip DePoy’s Maddy Brimley, who stands up to attempts to shut down the small-town bookstore inherited from her aunt;
• David Feldman’s Dora Ellison, the hardboiled garbage collector (!) who becomes a relentless vigilante investigator;
• Kimberly Giarratano’s Billie Levine, a blue-collar, “badass Jersey girl” private investigator;
• Neil Gordon’s Allison (“Alley”) Rosenthal, the gun-runner’s daughter who is also a Yale law student; and
• Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, the famous Chicago private investigator star of Paretsky’s 22-volume series.

While the male Jewish detective protagonists in our sample include some noir, hard-boiled examples, many of them also deviate from the stereotype, for example Canadian Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman and American Roger Simon’s Moses Wine. Some of our male authors are included in the cozy category, e.g. Jacob Appel, Ezra Barany, Larry Beinhart, Arthur Goldstein, Ron Goulart, David Handler, Harry Kemelman, Neil Plakcy, Frederick Ramsay, Arthur Schaefer, Joseph Telushkin, Mervyn Westreich and James Yaffe.

Do the female authors present more female main protagonists, while the male authors present less, as might be expected? One study confirms that quite dramatically, finding that 59% of the books written by women featured at least one female detective, while only 11% of the books by men did! [Source: Sharon Lohr, Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics (hc, Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2019) 978-0367192310 (pb, Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2019) 978-1138489073] Our sample had a similar trend, but with significantly more deployment of female protagonists on the part of male authors.

2.3 “Geezer Noir” and “Geezer Cozy”

“Geezer” is one of those flexible terms which can be applied negatively and pejoratively or positively and fondly. I prefer the latter usage, with no connection to the fact that, as of this writing, I am a mere 77. Euphemisms such as “geriatric detective literature” rather than “geezer mysteries” are unnecessary and even a little silly.

Here is a ChatGPT definition: Geezer noir is a crime-fiction subgenre in which an elderly protagonist—typically in later retirement—investigates crime while confronting the physical, psychological, and social realities of aging. Unlike the lighter “geezer cozy,” geezer noir retains the moral ambiguity, melancholy, and existential concerns of classic noir, using old age not merely as characterization but as a central source of conflict, insight, and narrative meaning.

“Geezer noir” is not an officially recognized publishing category but rather an informal critical term that has gained currency. It refers to crime fiction featuring an older—usually retired or semi-retired—protagonist, often in his or her late sixties, seventies, or beyond, who becomes involved in criminal investigation while confronting the realities of old age. Its main protagonist is usually diminished to some extent, either physically or mentally or both, aware of and worried about it, and acutely conscious of mortality. Despite recurring health issues – such as hearing or vision loss, reduced stamina, memory lapses and fear of despondency – the protagonist wins out in the end, not through brawn or bravado, but rather through experience, wisdom, psychological insight and patience.

Much of the writing in this category carries a bittersweet undertone, an awareness of past disappointments, unfinished business – personal and professional, moral ambiguity, lost opportunities and a sense of detachment from current fads and slang. In many cases it is counter-balanced by the satisfaction of “beating the clock” through continued effectiveness and through exploiting both a long memory and society’s frequent under-estimation, as investigative advantages. Recurring themes are: aging with dignity, memory and identity, intergenerational conflict, friendship in old age, widowhood, the joys (or not) of grandparenthood, declining masculinity or femininity, regrets and sheer survival.

The cozy-noir distinction among geezers runs mostly parallel to gender, with the women clearly enjoying a better time of it in their cozy mode. ChatGPT offers this summary of the differences:

Here are some examples from our author sample, including the main protagonist’s name and one of the relevant titles. In some cases, later stages of long-running series are included, as protagonists age through the years:

Reed Farrell Coleman - Moe Prager (“The Hollow Girl”)

Howard Engel - Benny Cooperman (“East of Suez”) – See Canadian bib.

Steven Forman - Eddie Perlmutter (“Boca Knights”)

Daniel Friedman – Buck Schatz (“Running Out of Road”)

Arthur D. Goldstein - Max Guttman (“Nobody’s Sorry He Got Killed”)

Saul Golubcow – Frank Wolf (“Were the Angels Wrong?”)

Philip Gourevitch – Andy Rosenzweig (“A Cold Case”)

Jane Isenberg - Bel Barrett (“Hot Wired”)

Stuart M. Kaminsky - Abe Lieberman (“The Dead Don’t Lie”)

Faye Kellerman - Peter Decker (“The Hunt”)

Rita Lakin - Gladdy Gold (“Getting Old Will Haunt You”)

Derek Miller - Sheldon Horowitz (“Norwegian by Night”)

Mark Reutlinger - Rose Kaplan & Ida Berkowitz (“Mrs. Kaplan and the Matzoh Ball of Death”)

James Siegel – William Riskin (“Epitaph”)

Seymour Shubin - Jack Lehman (“The Man from Yesterday”)

Serita Stevens & Rayanne Moore - Fanny Zindel (“Red Sea, Dead Sea”)

Andy Weinberger - Amos Parisman (“The Gonif)”)

James Yaffe - Mom mysteries (“A Nice Murder for Mom”)

Chat GPT offers a final thought on the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish geezer trends. “In many mainstream examples—such as Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club—age is often treated with warmth, humor, and the pleasure of outwitting younger people. By contrast, Jewish examples are more likely to intertwine aging with historical memory, questions of moral responsibility, continuity of Jewish life, and the lingering effects of the Holocaust or immigrant experience. The mystery becomes not only “Who committed the crime?” but also “What does this crime reveal about the past that still shapes the present?” That emphasis on memory and ethical reckoning gives the Jewish branch of geezer noir a distinctive tone within the larger subgenre.” I am not sure how consistently that holds true, but it suggests an interesting line of future inquiry.

2.4 Guardians of the Jewish People?

After considering some of the gender variations in this literature, we should pause to examine the stereotype of the Jewish gangster as symbols of masculinity, “tough Jews” who – their criminal activities notwithstanding – still retained basic ethnic loyalties and knew how to physically protect other Jews from external enemies when necessary. In other words: rough characters who would still stand up as guardians of their people when the chips were down. The stereotype was not without some truth, primarily based on events during the 1930s in different countries, where local pro-fascist movements flourished and targeted local Jews.

Many British Jews know about the violent encounters – literally street battles – against the Union of British Fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosely, culminating in the Battle of Cable Street on Oct. 4, 1936. On that occasion, a demonstrative fascist march through London’s heavily Jewish East End was violently halted by a coalition of young, working-class British Jews, reinforced by some of the famous Jewish thugs of those same neighbourhoods, together with a sympathetic force of trade-unionists and members of other minority groups. (See the companion UK non-fiction bibliography for more on this.)

In the US, some meetings of the flagrantly pro-Nazi German-American Bund were broken up bloodily by groups recruited from the ranks of local Jewish toughs wielding baseball bats and padded lead pipes. See: Robert Rockaway, “Gangsters vs. Nazis: How the Jewish mob fought American admirers of the Third Reich”, Tablet, July 3, 2020; and Benson, Michael, Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in WW2 Era America (see p. 209 for summary) in the non-fiction bibliography of U.S. Jews and crime. See also another Rockaway article (“Hoodlum Hero”) and the Bergoffen article (“Guardians, millionaires, and fearless fighters”) in the same place.

These are usefully supplemented by the historically based novel, Newark Minutemen by Leslie K. Barry, in the U.S. crime fiction bibliography (see p.54); by Rachel Maddow’s Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, in the U.S. non-fiction crime bibliography (see p.215); and by the references in the novel by Philip Roth, a son of Newark, NJ - The Plot Against America (see p.168). Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (see p.64) describes other forms of Jewish resistance to the American Nazi activity of that era. The spy network and resistance to the Nazi takeover of Hollywood, led by Jewish attorney, Leon Lewis, is described in Hitler in Los Angeles by Steven J. Ross (see p.219) and in Hollywood’s Spies by Laura B. Rosenzweig (see p.218), in the U.S. Jewish non-fiction bibliography.

After WWII, in reaction to the Holocaust and subsequent events in the Middle East, Ben Hecht famously joined forces with the notorious Los Angeles mobster leader, Mickey Cohen, to raise funds from Jewish gangland figures to buy and smuggle arms for the “tough Jews” of the Irgun, fighting the British for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. See the entry on Ben Hecht in the bibliography on American Jewish crime fiction (p.116), as well as the details of Micky Cohen’s biography in the non-fiction bibliography of American Jewish crime (p.206). Joan Lipinsky Cochran (“The Yiddish Gangster’s Daughter”) also references the arms smuggling.

Canadian Jewish history has parallel stories as part of its legacy of the 1930s and confrontations with local pro-Nazi movements. The riot at Christie Pits in Toronto in 1933 (see p. 371 in the non-fiction bibliography on Canadian Jews and Crime) was marked by the active participation of well-known Jewish criminals and professional boxers. And I recall hearing verbal testimony as a youngster in Montreal about pitched battles between groups of young Jewish men (though not the Jewish underworld figures) and local French-Canadian fascist sympathizers.

As post-WWII Jews moved rapidly into the middle classes and their children into white-collar occupations, becoming less familiar with rough street conflict in tough neighbourhoods, a certain romanticized nostalgia about these events of the 1930s gained currency. Rachel Rubin provides a reality check in her Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature (see summary on p.221 in the American Jewish criminals non-fiction bibliography). Without diminishing the role some gangsters played in certain situations in protecting other Jews, Rubin emphasizes that these same criminals were victimizers first and foremost of their own people! Their fortunes were typically based on extorting protection money from vulnerable Jewish merchants and tradesmen in their own neighbourhoods. For further material on this point, see also two other books cited in the same Jewish -American non-fiction bibliography: Robert Rockaway’s But He Was Good To His Mother (p.217) and Jenna Joselit’s Our Gang (p.213).

ChatGPT suggests an inverse relationship between the type of conflict depicted in a given novel and the gender of the main protagonists. Where the friction is institutional – as in war, geopolitics, military operations and intelligence services – male protagonists dominate. And where it is interpersonal – as in families, marriages, neighbourhoods and personal relationships – female protagonists are more prominent. That is another hypothesis for future testing.

The crime/espionage genre is very broad, and includes numerous sub-genres. A few of them will be listed below, along with some of the authors associated with them, as potential vectors for future research:

2.5 Psychological thrillers

where the focus is less on physical action and crime-solving and more on the mental-emotional states and conflicts of the main characters. Suspense derives from the uncertainties of hidden motivations, past traumas and grievances and character traits of the main protagonists. Some examples from a few authors on our different bibliographies: Atir, Ceren, Ephron, Gundar-Goshen, Hannah, Hezroni, Horowitz, Inbar, Jackont, Kirschman, Krich, Lawson, Liss, Nevo, Roth, Shubin, Tallis, Wiesel,

2.6 Police Procedurals

the emphasis is on official investigations of crimes, usually by teams of police or detectives, using professional methods and tools to unravel the mystery and to prove the case. Some examples from our bibliographies: Abram, Beck, Gur, Harstad, Hartstein, Haymon, Faye Kellerman, Krich, LeBor, Lescroart, Liss, Lockridge, Mishani, Miské, Nadel, Nykänen, Ramsay, Robert Rosenberg, Rotenberg, Sidransky, and Sheldon Siegel, Male and female authors are near-parity in this sub-genre.

2.7 Diverse Historical Settings

the mysteries take place in a wide variety of historical settings, where the Jewish protagonist has to cope with the constraints on Jewish life of the time and place. Examples: Trop (1^st-century Alexandria); Mesusan (Andalus, in 10^th-century Spain); Roe (14^th-century Spain); Poole (Rome, 1492); Lewis M. Weinstein (15^th century Seville, Spain and Florence, Italy); Bockian (17^th-century Venice Ghetto); Zimler (16^th-century Portugal and 17^th-century Goa); Zelvin (16^th-century Turkey); Goldin (19^th-century Constantinople); Margolis (a Russian shtetl in 1871); George (Russia in the 1880s-1890s); Babel (Odessa, 1905–1919); Miłoszewski (Sandomierz, Poland, 2009); Liss (London in the 1700s); Astaire (Regency London, early 19^th century); Hurst (a town in the English Cotswolds in the 1860s); Sansom (County Antrim, Northern Ireland, 2004); Brady (Dublin, 1991); Miské (Paris, 2010); Kazinski (Copenhagen, 2009); Gilbers (Berlin, 1930s); Wishnia (Prague Ghetto, 1592); Cozarinsky (Buenos Aires, 1920s); Ebersohn (South Africa, 1977); Greenwood (Melbourne, 1928); Allan Levine (Winnipeg, 1911); LeBor (Budapest, 2015); Padura (Havana, 2009).

2.8 Legal Thrillers

in this subset of crime fiction, the legal process and its practitioners, including lawyers, judges, law professors and students, are central to the action and the suspense. Proving guilt or innocence, seeking conclusive evidence, struggling with legal-ethical dilemmas, combatting corruption in the system, are typical recurring themes. Some examples from our bibliographies: Beck, Carmon, Gruber, Lescroart, Michael Kahn, Levitsky, Miloszewski, Ram Oren, Parrish, Patterson, Piesman, Shoham, Julie Smith.

2.9 Comic, humorous and satirical crime fiction

where liberties are taken with the standard characters and plots of the genre to serve the purposes of entertainment, parody or social criticism. This manifests in the use of eccentric detectives or criminals, witty, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, parody and unexpected outcomes, and often – happy and comforting endings. This may overlap some of the cozy mysteries, though certainly not all. Some examples from our bibliographies: Chafets (“Inherit the Mob”); Forman (“Boca Knights”); Kinky Friedman (the “Kinkster” series, starring himself); Ed Goldberg (Lenny Schneider in “Served Cold”); Matthew Lee Goldberg (“the Great Gimmelmans”); Goulart (Groucho Marx series); Susan Isaacs (Judith Singer series); Delia Rosen (the Deadly Deli series); Elise Sax (Matchmaker Mysteries series); Jasmine Schwartz (Melissa Morris series); Laurie Gwen Shapiro (Heather Greenblotz in “The Matzo Ball Heiress”); Roger L. Simon (Moses Wine series); Stevens-Moore (Fanny Zindel series); Stone (“The Prison Minyan”). Woody Allen (“Getting Even” and “Without Feathers”) and Bruce Jay Friedman (“The Dick”) both satirize the entire mystery genre, each in his own unique manner.

A subset of this category pays tribute to the enduring precedent of Sherlock Holmes by generating novels referencing him, e.g.: Chabon (“The Final Solution”); Fish (“Schlock Holmes”); Ron Goulart (“Elementary, My Dear Groucho”); Laurie King (Sherlock mentor to Mary Russell); Kreppel (the Yiddish Holmes); Horowitz (the Hawthorne & Horowitz Mystery Series); Nicholas Meyer (“The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols”); and Weinstein (the James Bond Jewish parody – “Agent Oy-Oy-7”). See also Margalit Fox’s non-fiction “Conan Doyle for the Defense” at the end of the UK bibliography (p. 424).

2.10 Holocaust Consciousness

Holocaust Consciousness - The shadow of the Holocaust is pervasive, finding varied expressions in some of the novels, and is a recurring component in the Jewish identity and awareness of many of the protagonists. A survey of literature on the interaction of Jews with crime could easily have become obsessed with the astronomical crime of the Holocaust (see the synopsis of Michael Berkowitz’s seminal book on the Nazi myth of total Jewish criminality in the non-fiction part of the International authors’ chapter below). This subject deserves respectful treatment on its own. Certainly it can and should be studied with the tools of literary scholarship, but not in the same universe as the mysteries and thrillers of this collection.

For this reason, I have not attempted to survey the material on the bogus crimes attributed by the Nazis to their Jewish victims, nor on the Jewish police in ghettoes during the Holocaust. There is more than enough material to examine on the subject in so-called “normal” times and societies. The unique circumstances of the Shoah and its literature mandate separate attention. I have therefore tried – not always successfully – to avoid overlapping with Holocaust literature and issues.

2.10.1 Sven-Erik Rose, Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz and Vilna Ghettoes

[I will digress and momentarily contradict the point just made by briefly referencing one remarkable recent book: Rose, Sven-Erik, (Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos [hc, Brandeis UP, 2025]) 978-1684582730 [pb, Brandeis UP, 978-1684582754.

What Rose shows is that certain authors in the ghettos in real time grappled with their impossible situations by doing what they best knew how to do – writing – in a variety of genres, including the detective story and the gothic horror tale. They were not naively resorting to literary escapism, they were asserting their humanity and artistic autonomy by creating works of literature that would live after them and after the unimaginable conditions of deteriorating daily lives in the ghettos. The detective mode was one useful tool to apply to the threatening realities in which only fragments of information and disparate clues were available, in the attempt to understand and make some sense out of what was really happening. The ghetto authors brilliantly meditated on the grotesque incongruities between established literary models – like the classic detective story – and the extreme conditions of their daily existence. Even there, detective story models had a role in helping to mediate reality and preserve personal agency.

Authors like Gustawa Jarecka in Warsaw and Hermann Kruk in Vilna chronicled daily occurrences in their extreme environments and sought to use detective-like logic to assemble some coherent picture of what was happening. This was ultimately a hopeless task, because of the systematic deceptions and disinformation deployed by the Nazi authorities. The Jewish authors could not therefore analyze and solve a crime that had already happened, because the crime was continuous and they were trapped within its confines. What they could do was to use their human and artistic resources to grasp the scraps of evidence that were available, and thereby to refuse the surrender of their humanity through passive despair and withdrawal. I think Viktor Frankl would have approved].

Some of our 374 authors are survivors (Wiesel, Appelfeld, Kertész, Kiš, Bezés). Some escaped only by emigrating in time, like Sholem Asch, Joseph Opatoshu, the two Singer brothers and two graphic artists, Will Eisner and Joe Kubert. More than 50 years later, Kubert published a graphic book (“Yossel April 19, 1943 “) imagining what his life would have been like in the Warsaw Ghetto had his parents not emigrated when they did. Arthur Koestler was living in France when the War began and barely made it out to Britain, where he spent the duration. Romain Gary, born in Vilnius and later naturalized as a French citizen flew with the Free French Air Force during the war. Joseph Heller and Henry Denker both saw combat during the war. Will Eisner, Budd Schulberg, Saul Bellow, Howard Fast, Meyer Levin and Jerome Weidman all served in various non-combat, mostly writing roles. At least 14 of the authors are the children of survivors (Bonert, Fradkin, Golubcow, Gourevich, Gur, Gutfreund, Keret, Krich, Modiano, Raphael (Lev), Rotenberg, Thane Rosenbaum, Sidransky, Warsh).

Some of the authors’ main protagonists are survivors, e.g. Bellow (Arthur Sammler); Del Bourgo (Simon Wolfe); Dunsky (Adam Lapid); Golubcow (Frank Wolf); Horowitz (Atticus Pünd); Kanon (Max Weill); Novis (“Riva”, closest friend of the main protagonist); Modiano (Guy Roland); Paretsky (the Lotty Herschel persona); Robert Rosenberg (Avram Cohen); Wiesel (e.g. “The Fifth Son” and “The Sonderberg Case”); Zerries (“Stealing from the Dead”); and Zimler (Benni and Shelly Zarco). In Canadian Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache series, the beloved grandmother figure who raises the main protagonist after his parents’ tragic death is a Holocaust survivor named, simply, “Zora”.

And some of the main protagonists in their novels are children of survivors, e.g. Shlomit Beck (Sergeant Joe Gallo); Kenneth Bonert (Isaac Helger); Sam Bourne (Rebecca Merton); Talia Carner (Brooke Fielding); Miles Corwin (Ash Levine); Barbara Fradkin (Inspector Michael Greene); Andrew Gross (Nathan Blum); Faye Kellerman (Rina Lazarus); Nicole Krauss (Yoav and Leah Weisz); Richard Patterson (Harold Shorr, father of protagonist’s fiancée); Lev Raphael (Nick Hoffman); Robert Rotenberg (Detective Ari Greene); Sylvia Warsh (Dr. Rebecca Temple).

A few authors focus on the Weimar regime in Germany preceding the Nazi rise to power in 1933, and the increasingly disastrous situation of German Jewry in the years following. Four fictional policemen attempt to dispense justice in the fast-deteriorating German situation during this period: Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, a non-Jew (actually a quarter Jew – enough for the Nazi race laws – with one Jewish grandparent); Jonathan Rabb’s Nikolai Hoffner, a half-Jew; and Paul Grossman’s Willi Kraus, a highly successful Jewish detective in the Berlin Police Homicide Department. Harald Gilbers’ Richard Oppenheim, a Jew married to an Aryan German woman, is depicted as such a brilliant Berlin detective that he survives WWII – they literally can’t do without him – and continues working into the Cold War era of the 1950s. Faye Kellerman has a one-off, standalone novel (“Straight Into Darkness”) set in Munich in 1929, featuring a non-Jewish detective romantically involved with a Jewish woman, and pursuing a serial killer. (See also the material in the International authors’ non-fiction section – under Germany – about the real-life Berlin Jewish policeman, Dr. Bernhard Weiss.]

German efforts to infiltrate agents into the U.S. had a precedent, even before the American entry into World War I. German saboteurs orchestrated a massive explosion in July 1916 at the Black Tom Island munitions depot in New York harbor, an event underlying Neil Perry Gordon’s novel (“The Bomb Squad: Clash of the Patriots”). Max Rothman, a Jewish NYPD detective, forms a special squad to foil extension of this terror campaign on U.S. soil. In the late 1930s and early 40s, German spies were active in America, and extraordinary efforts were made to intercept them. Andrew Rosenheim presents a 3-volume series featuring a non-Jewish German-American FBI agent in the late 1930s (Jimmy Nessheim) infiltrating American pro-Nazi organizations. In “The Fifth Column” by Andrew Gross, a hidden network of Nazi sleeper cells and spies working covertly to sabotage the United States from within is uncovered. And Eric Dezenhall (“The Devil Himself”) describes a collaboration between Meyer Lansky and the U.S. Navy to catch German spies during WWII, a subject he later expanded on in a non-fiction work (“Wiseguys and the White House”). Details of all these books are available in the fiction bibliography on American Jewish crime.

The massive Nazi theft of Jewish-owned art and other assets during the Shoah and later attempts to recover it are a backdrop in some of the novels, e.g. Asher (“The Titus Conspiracy”); Neil Gordon (“Sacrifice of Isaac”); Marks (“Artist’s Proof”); LeBor (Danube Blues trilogy); Padura (“Heretics”); Paretsky (“Total Recall”); Rose (“The Hypnotist”); Rosenbaum (“Sasha’s Trick”); B.A. Shapiro (“The Muralist” and “The Lost Masterpiece”); Silva (“The English Assassin”); Zerries (“The Lost Van Gogh”); and Zimler (“The Warsaw Anagrams”).

Attempts to rescue Holocaust victims are central in Abarbanell (“Displaced”); Gross (“The One Man”); Keizer (“The Longest Night”); LeBor (“Dohany Street’ & “The Last Days of Budapest”); Rose (“The Book of Lost Fragrances”); Silva (“The Confessor”). The unique Holocaust refugee community in China is the setting for Kanon’s “Shanghai” and Rozan’s “The Shanghai Moon”.

The post-war pursuit of Nazi war criminals figures in the following books, among others: Abram (“An Eye for an Eye”); David Del Bourgo (“Tracking Down Gruppenführer Kunitz”|); Daniel Friedman (“Don’t Ever Get Old”); Kanon (“The Accomplice”); Kerr (“A German Requiem” & “A Quiet Flame”); LeBor (“District VIII” & “The Budapest Protocol”); Richler (“St. Urbain’s Horseman”); James Siegel (“Epitaph”); Silva (“A Death in Vienna”); and Warsh (“To Die in Spring”).

Finally, Tova Reich (“My Holocaust”), exposes the ugly face of Jewish post-war exploiters of the Holocaust and survivors for criminal gain. A.J. Zerries (“Stealing from the Dead”) describes a dark conspiracy to defraud Holocaust survivors of the reclamation funds due them and to redirect them to the financing of international terrorism. Boris Fishman (“A Replacement Life”) has a protagonist who assists elderly Russian Jews in Brooklyn, who are Soviet refugees but not necessarily Holocaust survivors, to file fraudulent restitution claims, for which he is paid.

This does not add up to a massive preoccupation with the |Holocaust on the part of our author sample. All the examples just cited don’t involve more than 10-20% of them. But even if it is not referred to explicitly and frequently, my strong impression is that the Holocaust has a place in the consciousness of most of them.

2.11 Jewish Identity of Authors and Protagonists

The diversity is wide: the great majority of both authors and protagonists are not religiously observant, but rather secular or cultural Jews, often identifying loosely with a general idea of improving the world or protecting the weak. A few with some Jewish knowledge may connect this approach to Jewish values, such as tikkun olam, but most do not. One American author (Zachary Klein) had his protagonist (Matt Jacob, a private investigator) say that his “connection to Jewish ended when the hospital tossed his foreskin into a tray after his birth”. This same author experienced religious influences during his youth and eventually rejected the lifestyle, but still considers himself a Jewish American. In one of his novels, he has Matt Jacob clear a Hasidic rabbi of murder charges. Certain other authors – e.g. Beinhart, Stanley Cohen, Lyons, Salinger, Steven Schwartz and Shubin – identify only very marginally with Jewish ethnicity. As one indication of distance from conventional Jewish affiliation, almost one-third of the Jewish protagonists in our sample are either married or romantically linked to non-Jewish partners.

Some of the authors make their protagonists half- or partial Jews. Examples:

Ceren, Sandra Levy, Dr. Cory Cohen (“Prescription for Terror”)

Max Allan Collins – Nate Heller (“True Detective”)

Julia Dahl – Rebekah Roberts (“Invisible City”)

Kyra Davis – Sophie Katz (“Sex, Murder and a Double Latte”)

Matt Goldman – Nils Shapiro (“Gone to Dust”)

Susan Isaacs – Linda Voss (“Shining Through”)

Philip Kerr – Bernie Gunther (“The Pale Criminal “)

Laurie King – Mary Russell (“The Beekeeper’s Apprentice”)

John Lescroart – Abe Glitsky (“A Certain Justice”)

Laura Lippman – Tess Monaghan (“By a Spider’s Thread [Tess Monaghan #8])

Arthur Lyons – Jacob Asch (“The Dead Are Discreet”)

Sara Paretsky – V.I. Warshawski (“Total Recall”)

Jonathan Rabb – Detective Nikolai Hoffner (“Rosa”)

Laurie Gwen Shapiro – Rachel Ganelli (“The Unexpected Salami”)

This might suggest a certain ambivalence on the author’s part about Jewish identity, though that would not apply to at least two of the above (Kerr and Lescroart), who are not Jewish. It is also not relevant for Susan Isaacs, who deploys Jewish protagonists liberally throughout her many books.

A number of the authors have non-Jewish protagonists addressing Jewish cases and situations, for example:

Cara Black – Aimée Leduc (“Murder in the Marais”)

John Brady – Matt Minogue (“Kaddish in Dublin”)

Margaret Frazer – Sister Frevisse (“The Sempster’s Tale”)

G.K. George – Inspector Vasili Vasiliev (“To Kill a Tsar”)

Tod Goldberg – in which Sal Cupertine, an Italian-American gangster, successfully masquerades as a rabbi to evade the FBI (“Gangsterland” series)

Donald Harstad - Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman (“A Long December”)

Douglas Jackson – Jan Kalisz (“Blood Sacrifice”)

Stuart Kaminsky – (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov – (“A Cold Red Sunrise” – note that Rostnikov’s wife is Jewish)

William Kienzle – Father Robert Koesler (“Requiem for Moses”)

Adam LeBor - Balthazar Kovacs (“Kossuth Square”)

Zygmunt Miloszewski – Prosecutor Teodor Szacki (“A Grain of Truth”)

Leonardo Padura – Detective Mario Conde (“Heretics”)

Sara Poole – Francesca Giordano (“Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance”)

Andrew Rosenheim – Jimmy Nessheim (“Fear Itself”)

Debbie Viguié – Cindy Preston in partnership with Rabbi Jeremiah Silverman (“The Lord Is My Shepherd”)

Of the 15 authors just mentioned, 11 are non-Jewish, which perhaps makes their choice of non-Jewish protagonists more convenient.

How many of the authors in this sample of 374 are non-Jewish? I estimate 47, or 12.6%, though not all authors publicize their religious or ethnic membership, so that may be an under-estimate, at least of those born Jewish. (Authors of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish parentage are not included in this count.) How many actively identify as Jewish is not easily knowable. Here are the ones whose non-Jewish identity is on the public record:

1. Stephan Abarbanell (has Jewish ancestors going back 5 or more generations)
2. Toni Brill (Anthony & Martha Brill Olcott)
3. John Brady
4. Rawya Burbara
5. Phillip DePoy
6. Charles Dickens
7. Wessel Ebersohn
8. Umberto Eco
9. Ian Fleming
10. Margaret Frazer
11. G.K. George (Alfred J. Rieber)
12. Harald Gilbers
13. Robert Goddard
14. Kerry Greenwood
15. Robert Harris
16. Donald Harstad
17. Douglas Jackson
18. Dietrich Kalteis
19. A.J. Kazinski (pseudonym of Danish authors, Anders Rønnow Klarlund and Jacob Weinreich, both non-Jewish – ChatGPT)
20. Gregg Keizer
21. Philip Kerr
22. William Kienzle
23. Laurie King
24. Stieg Larsson
25. John LeCarré
26. John Lescroart
27. Laura Lippman
28. Frances & Richard Lockridge
29. Charlotte MacLeod
30. Ernesto Mallo
31. Zygmunt Miloszewski
32. Karim Miské
33. Rayanne Moore (co-author with Serita Stevens, who is Jewish)
34. Barbara Nadel
35. Harri Nykänen
36. Sergio Olguin
37. Leonardo Padura
38. Richard N. Patterson
39. Louise Penny
40. Sara Poole
41. Frederick Ramsay
42. Caroline Medora Sale Roe
43. Ian Sansom
44. Guy Saville
45. Hubert Selby Jr.
46. Julie Smith
47. Frank Tallis

At the other end of the spectrum, there are numerous strongly identifying Jews, and even rabbis! To begin with, there are a number of rabbis among the authors, e.g. Martin S. Cohen, Naomi Graetz (a rabbi’s wife), Philip Graubart, Roger Herst, Andrew Kane, Lawrence Raphael, Gidon Rothstein, Arthur Schaefer, Ilene Schneider and Joseph Telushkin.

Clergy are also well represented among the protagonists, as follows: Jacob Appel (Rabbi Jacob Kappelmacher); Tod Goldberg (“Rabbi David Cohen” who is actually a hitman posing as a rabbi, but who puts in a fair performance); Naomi Graetz (Toby Kramer, a rabbi’s wife and professor who solves a murder in her Teaneck, NJ community); Philip Graubart (Rabbi Yael Gold); Roger Herst (Rabbi Gabrielle Lewyn); Sharon Kahn (Ruby Rothman, the rabbi’s widow, who remains heavily involved in running the temple); Harry Kemelman (Rabbi David Small, pioneer of the clerical sleuths); Shulamith Kustanowitz (Rabbi David London); Rachel Lewis (Rabbi Vivian Green); Arthur Schaefer (Rabbi Elijah Daniels); Ilene Schneider (Rabbi Aviva Cohen); Joseph Telushkin (Rabbi Daniel Winter); Debbie Viguié (Rabbi Jeremiah Silverman); Marvin Wolf (Rabbi Ben Maimon).

In addition to the rabbis, some authors are personally observant, or write for or about an explicitly orthodox or even ultra-orthodox (“haredi”) audience, or else present protagonists who are religiously observant to one extent or another, e.g.

Shlomit Beck (“Lapdance”)

John Jacob Clayton, (“Mitzvah Man”)

Joan Lipinsky Cochran (“The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son”)

Julia Dahl (“Invisible City”)

Chaim Eliav (“In the Spider’s Web”)

Harriet K. Feder, (“Mystery in Miami Beach”)

Saul Golubcow (in his Frank Wolf series)

Stuart Kaminsky (in his Abe Lieberman series)

Faye Kellerman (Rina Lazarus in the Lazarus-Decker series)

Zachary Klein (“Still Among the Living”)

Rochelle Major Krich (in her Molly Blume series)

Richard Parrish (“Nothing But the Truth”)

Neil Plakcy in his Steve Levitan/Golden Retriever series)

Naomi Ragen (“The Devil in Jerusalem”)

David Rosenbaum (“Zaddik”)

Irv Segal (“Secrets of the Rabbi’s Mafia”)

Yair Weinstock, (“The Gordian Knot”)

Melvyn Westreich (“Murder in the Kollel”)

Batya Swift Yasgur (“The Search for the Real Megan”)

Nonetheless, to avoid misrepresentation, it should be repeated that the great majority of the Jewish protagonists are not religiously observant. In many cases they are conscious of and comfortable with a cultural and ethnic tie to their Jewish backgrounds, but not a formal religious one. A number of them are so-called “gastronomic” Jews, i.e. emphasize the role of Jewish food in connecting them to their Jewish affiliations (Joan L. Cochran, Ed Goldberg, Anthony Horowitz, Sharon Kahn, Beth Kalikoff, Lily Levner, Carol Novis, Delia Rosen, Dorothy & Sidney Rosen, Robert Rotenberg, Laurie G. Shapiro, Daphne Silver).

Many more refer to Yiddish as the link to their Jewish roots. None of them is depicted as a fluent Yiddish speaker, but many employ Yiddish terms and expressions and enjoy “Yiddish-inflected humour”. See for example: Miriam Allenson, Jacob Appel, Jerome Charyn, Harlan Coben, Will Eisner, Robert Fish, Barbara Fradkin, Daniel Fuchs, Michael Gold, Arthur Goldstein, Ron Goulart, Andrew Gross, Isidore Haiblum, Sharon Kahn, Joe Kubert, Rita Lakin, Samuel Ornitz, Mark Reutlinger, Delia Rosen, Elise Sax, Jasmine Schwartz, Andy Weinberger and Daniel Weizmann. This suggests that many of them were raised in first- or second- generation families where Yiddish language and expressions were common. Very few of the American and Canadian authors were born outside of North America, barely 5%, and almost all of those that were - arrived as children.

2.12 Legends of the Lamed-Vav and The Golem

Two famous elements of Jewish folklore inform some of the novels in our sample. The first is the legend of the 36 “Righteous Men” – the Lamed Vav in Hebrew letters, with a numerical value of 36 - whose gigantic moral stature is the only thing saving the world from obliteration. Their identities are hidden, and protecting them from various conspiracies is tantamount to rescuing the world. This motif recurs in five novels:

Barany, Ezra, (“36 Righteous: A Serial Killer’s Hit List”)

Bourne, Sam, (“The Righteous Men”)

Gordon, Neil Perry, (“The Righteous One: A Cobbler’s Journey into the Dreamworld and Beyond)

Gregory, Jill & Karen Tintori, (“The Book of Names”)

Kazinski, A.J. pseudonym of Anders Rønnow Klarlund and Jacob Weinreich), (“The Last Good Man”)

The more widespread reference is to the legend of the Golem, the powerful giant created out of mud or clay by the 16^th-century Prague Rabbi Judah Loew (the “Maharal” of Prague), using Kabbalistic ceremonies, to protect his community from deathly anti-Semitic attacks. This precursor to Mary Shelley’s 19^th-century Frankenstein, like his literary descendants, falls out of his creator’s control and wreaks havoc, and figures in a number of the works in our sample:

Chabon, Michael, (“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay”)

Jackson, Douglas (“Blood Sacrifice”)

Kellerman, Jonathan & Jesse Kellerman, (“The Golem of Hollywood”)

Kellerman, Jonathan & Jesse Kellerman, (“The Golem of Paris”)

Kluger, Daniel, (“The Shtetl Book: Jewish Horror Stories”)

Kubert, Joe, “The Golem”, first appeared as a standalone graphic story in The Challenger #3 (published by Interfaith Publications / T.C. Comics, 1946).

Lewis, Rachel Sharona, (“The Rabbi Who Prayed for the City”) – examines the ethics of artificial intelligence by referencing the Golem narrative.

Nadel, Barbara, (“The East Ham Golem”)

Piercy, Marge, (“He, She and It”)

Rosenbaum, Thane, (“The Golems of Gotham”)

Simon, Roger L., (“Emet”)

Isaac Bashevis Singer (“The Golem”)

Tallis, Frank, (“Darkness Rising”)

Wishnia, Kenneth, (“The Fifth Servant” & “Burning Twight”) [Note: Wishnia’s first “Jewish Noir” anthology also featured a dark, supernatural crime story “The Golem of Jericho” by Jonathan Santlofer, which explores a bullied boy and his grandfather who build a golem to retaliate against abusers]. See also the summary of Arnold Goldsmith’s book (“The Golem Remembered, 1909–1980: Variations of a Jewish Legend”) in the non-fiction section of the International Authors chapter (p.485) of this bibliography.

2.13 Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah

References to Jewish folklore and golem legends often overlap a preoccupation with Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah, with powerful secret codes, dybbuks, demons, formulae and hidden meanings, in some of these books. This is true of the Kluger and Tallis books in the preceding list, as well as in the following:

Paul Auster (“City of Glass”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Ezra Barany, “The Torah Codes” – U.S. fiction bib.

Arthur Asa Berger, “The Kabbalah Killings” – U.S. fiction bib.

David Black, “An Impossible Life: A Bobeh Myseh” – U.S. fiction bib.

Martin S. Cohen, “Light from Dead Stars” – U.S. fiction bib.

Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori, “The Book of Names” -– U.S. fiction bib.

Katz, Yoram (Yoav), “Lethal Scripture: A Historical Mystery” - _ Israeli fiction bib.

Zachary Lazar, “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” – U.S. fiction bib.

Caroline Roe, “Solace for a Survivor” – International fiction bib.

Janice Steinberg, “Death in a City of Mystics” – U.S. fiction bib.

Richard Zimler, “The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon” – International fiction bib.

2.14 The Jewish White Slave Industry

One of the most shameful and painful aspects of 20^th century Jewish criminal activity was the trafficking of young Jewish women from Eastern Europe, primarily to Argentina, for work as prostitutes. White slavery is also an integral part of the current Israeli crime landscape. Ironically, many of those trafficked to Israel today are non-Jewish women from Eastern Europe. Our bibliographies, fiction and mainly non-fiction, list a number of sources on this subject:

Carner, Talia, “The Third Daughter” – U.S. fiction bib. (p.63)

Englander, Nathan, “The Ministry of Special Cases” – U.S. fiction bib. (p.85)

Gordon, Neil Perry, – “Sadie’s Sin: The Zwi Migdal\s Reign of Terror” – U.S. fiction bib. (p.106)

Cozarinsky, Edgar, “The Moldavian Pimp” – International fiction bib. (p.438)

Singer, Isaac Bashevis, “Scum” – International fiction bib. (p.475)

Non-fiction Sources: (full references in the companion U.S. Jewish crime non-fiction, International and Israeli non-fiction bibliographies)

Adler, Polly, “A House Is Not A Home” (p.207)

Applegate, Debby, “Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age” (p.208)

Bristow, Edward, “Prostitution & Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870–1939” [hc, Schocken, 1983] 978-0805238662

Donovan, Brian and Tori Barnes-Brus, “Narratives of sexual consent and coercion: Forced prostitution trials in progressive-era New York City”

Glickman, Nora, “The Jewish White Slave Trade & the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman” (p.499)

Hertzog, Esther & Erella Shadmi [eds], “Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking in Women: Israel’s Blood Money” (p.332)

Joseph, Judith Lee Vaupen, “The Nafkeh and the Lady: Jewish Prostitutes and Progressives in New York City, 1900–1930” (p.214)

Mensch, Jean Ulitz, “Social pathology in urban America: desertion, prostitution, gambling, drugs and crime among eastern European Jews in New York City between 1881 and World War I” (p.216)

Pinzer, Maimie, “The Maimie Papers: Letters from an Ex-Prostitute” (p. 216)

Vincent, Isabel. “Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas” (p. 500)

Yarfitz, Mir, “Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina” (p.500)

2.15 Social-Political Perspectives on Jewish Crime

Crime is viewed by a significant group among our authors as an integral part of the immigrants’ lives, in response to the poverty and discrimination they experience in their struggle to survive and improve their circumstances against the oppression of “grasping landlords and exploitative employers”. Some politically conscious authors attribute this to the injustices of the American capitalist system. Michael Gold (p.100) writes in Jews Without Money: “America is so rich and fat because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.” Others view crime as a warped form of Americanization, and the blurring of a tenuous line between respectable and illicit conduct in the process of “making it”. As the second and third generations gradually transition out of the immigrant ghettoes via socioeconomic mobility, some of them resort to cutting corners and predatory business tactics to achieve success, as in Jerome Weidman’s classic protagonist in I Can Get It For You Wholesale (p.192) and Budd Schulberg’s in What Makes Sammy Run? (p.172) In different circumstances, such as pre-Revolutionary Russia or the Holocaust, crime becomes a completely legitimate means of fighting for survival and resisting an evil, antagonistic world. Some of the authors and books in this category include:

Babel, Isaac, (“Benya Krik, the Gangster” & “Odessa Stories”) – International fiction bib.

Amy Bloom, (“Away” & “Lucky Us”) – U.S. fiction bib.

E.L. Doctorow, (“The Book of Daniel”, “Billy Bathgate” & “Ragtime”) – U.S. fiction bib.

David Evanier, (“Red Love”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Howard Fast. (“The Confession of Joe Cullen”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Daniel Fuchs, (“The Williamsburg Trilogy”)

G.K. George. (“To Kill a Tsar” & “The Kiev Killings”) – International fiction bib.

Herbert Gold. (“Fathers”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Michael Gold. (“Jews Without Money”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Neil Gordon. (“The Company You Keep”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Albert Halper. (“The Chute” & “Atlantic Avenue”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Robert Littell, (“The Revolutionist”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Bernard Malamud, (“The Fixer”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Samuel Ornitz. (“Haunch, Paunch and Jowl”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Marge Piercy. (“Gone To Soldiers”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Budd Schulberg, (“What Makes Sammy Run?”) - U.S. fiction bib.

Jerome Weidman, (“I Can Get It For You Wholesale”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Shapiro, B.A., (“The Muralist”) – U.S. fiction bib.

2.16 Israel

The crime literature of the Jewish Diaspora is mainly a local phenomenon in which Israel does not play a pivotal role, or in many cases, any role at all. The protagonists are focused on the challenges of their environment, their occupations, their families. Israel is mostly a taken-for-granted background factor of their mostly secular, cultural identity, and not something which impacts their daily lives. Some of them may have friends or relatives there, or mention it in the context of giving refuge to Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern or Eastern European countries. Israeli politics or Israeli crime and criminals are rarely referenced in the Diaspora crime literature. In this as in everything else to do with our subject, there is no uniformity and plenty of diversity.

The authors who have more religious identities, such as the rabbinical authors mentioned earlier, or observant Jews like Faye Kellerman or Rochelle Krich, are more aware of and involved in Israel.

There are several examples of “archaeological thrillers”, where a Diaspora Jewish protagonist participates in an Israeli quest involving ancient artifacts or documents with major global implications, for example:

Bourne, Sam, (“The Last Testament”) – U.K. fiction bib.

Levin, Daniel, (“The Last Ember”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Raffel, Keith, (“Temple Mount”) – U.S. fiction bib.

In the same category, we can add a book by an American Jewish author with an Israeli protagonist: Frankel, Ellen, (“The Deadly Scrolls” – Israeli fiction bib.); and another by an Israeli-born author - Katz, Yoram (Yoav), (“Lethal Scripture: A Historical Mystery”).

The major interaction between our mystery/thriller authors and Israel occurs in the area of Mossad activities, anti-terrorism and offshoots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, i.e. firmly in the espionage and thriller side of the genre. These are by definition action novels and typically involve present and former Mossad agents. Some of the Israeli authors are themselves former intelligence officers of one kind or another, drawing on their operational experiences as source material, e.g. Yiftach Atir, Mishka Ben-David, Haggai Carmon, Uzi Eilam, Eli Evron and Nir Hezroni. Three others are senior or classified enough that they write under pen-names - Jonathan de Shalit, Spencer Hawke and Yarin Inbar – with almost no personal details about them publicly available.

Among writers referencing Mossad or other Israeli military activities or personnel, Daniel Silva is in a class of his own with his Gabriel Allon series (26 volumes and counting). There are other non-Israel-born authors who have either lived in Israel for varying periods and in some cases also served in the IDF or the intelligence services, as have some of their protagonists. For example:

Frankel, Ellen, (“The Passover Protocols”)

Friedland, Noah S., (“A House Divided”)

Gordon, Dan, (“Day of the Dead: Book One – Gaza”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Gordon, Stephen J. (“In the Name of God”) – Israeli fiction bib.

Jacobs, Daniel, (“The Eyes of Abel”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Kaplan, Howard, (“Bullets of Palestine”) – U.S. fiction bib.

Kestin, Hesh, [“The Lie”] – U.S. fiction bib.

Oren, Ram & Moti Kfir, (“Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy” – Israeli non-fiction bib.) – Israeli bib.

Rosenberg, Joel C., (“The Jerusalem Assassin”( – Israeli bib.

And two more Israel-born authors who touch on Mossad-related themes:

Isaac )Zepel( Yeshurun (“In the Service of the Mossad” – Hebrew series) – Israeli bib.

Zur, Yigal, (“Death in Shangri-La”) – Israeli bib.

It is tempting to digress from the focus on Jews and crime/espionage to examine the general attitudes of some of the authors in our sample to Israel. I will resist the temptation partially, limiting myself to a few brief observations. The general orientation of the authors in our sample is liberal, which predisposes them to criticism of Israel’s policies in recent decades. At the same time, none of them is prepared to deny a basic emotional attachment to the Jewish state, given their awareness of the Jewish past and what it took to create and defend the country

Israel was not very present in the written concerns of the authors who approached Jewish crime in its social-political context, except for Robert Littell, who spent some time there and co-authored a book with Shimon Peres about Israel’s future. Two Chicago-born authors – Ben Hecht (born 1894) and Meyer Levin (born 1905) – stand out for their passionate involvement with and advocacy for Israel’s emergence and early survival. Saul Bellow (“To Jerusalem and Back, 1976”), another Chicagoan, felt an instinctive though not uncritical solidarity with Israel. His Holocaust-survivor protagonist, Arthur Sammler, rushed to be in Israel after its dramatic 1967 war victory.

Philip Roth was certainly preoccupied with Israel (see “The Counterlife, 1986” and “Operation Shylock: A Confession, 1993”), but his attitude was much more ambivalent, and he rejected Zionist claims to a monopoly on an authentic Jewish life there. He was deeply concerned about Palestinian dispossession. He felt both alienation and “inescapable kinship”, with typical Rothian complexity. Michael Chabon is cooler in his attitude, and reaffirms Diaspora Jewish existences, as in his alternative-history invention of a Jewish world without Israel (“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”, 2007). A strong and public critic of Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians, Chabon still insists he is “animated by love” and empathy for the basic necessity of Israel’s existence.

Nathan Englander (“Dinner at the Center of the Universe”, 2017) professes a deep love for Israel alongside heartbreak at the political direction it has taken in the 21^st century. Inspired by the Oslo Accords, he moved to Jerusalem in 1996, and left with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2001. Other American Jewish writers, like Nicole Krauss, evince a deep attachment to Israel, and Zev Chafets lives in Tel Aviv. Canadian Mordecai Richler (“This Year in Jerusalem”, 1994) is in a similar place: basic attachment paired with deep disappointment. Israel must exist for all the historical reasons, but it gets no moral blank check for deviating from the humanitarian ideals of its socialist founders. The right-wing religious and nationalistic impulses are leading the country profoundly astray.

One conclusion: An in-depth study of the relationship between Israel and contemporary Diaspora Jewish authors and intellectuals is much needed.

APPENDIX – A Few Miscellaneous Points of Interest

2.17 Publishers

Here is an impressionistic list of some of the main publishers of Jewish crime fiction, or at least some of the publishers with the most interesting names:

Avon

Ballantine

Berkley

Bitter Lemon

Black Opal

Chatto & Windus

Collins

Cozy Cat Press

Crown Publishers

Dark Horse

Doubleday

Thomas Dunne

Dutton

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Fawcett

Felony & Mayhem Press

Forge Press

Foul Play

Grand Central

Harper

Harper Collins

Henry Holt

Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Kitchen Sink

Knopf

Level Best

Lippincott

Little, Brown

Wlliam Morrow

Minotaur

Mysterious Press

Norton

Penguin

Picador

Poisoned Pen

Putnam’s

Random House

Red Dress Ink

Scribner’s

Severn House

Simon & Schuster

Soho

St. Martin’s Press

Toby

Viking

Vintage

Weeping Willow

Wheatmark

Wicked Son

[My personal favourite is the aptly named “Felony & Mayhem Press.”] Interestingly, some 40 of our 374 fiction authors published their works independently, through the CreateSpace or other available platforms, featuring print-on-demand and other technological mechanisms designed to optimize circulation and free authors from publishing industry constraints. University presses (UPs) such as Harvard, Rutgers, Yale and Indiana, also participated in this space, more often in publishing relevant non-fiction works.

2.18 The Russian Connection

There is a significant “Russian presence” among the authors in our sample. Many of them are the children and grandchildren of Russian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews, e.g. Bellow, Doctorow, Fast, Fuchs, Furst, Harry Grey, Hecht, Kaminsky, Krauss, M. Levin, Littell, Malamud, Piercy, Roth and others.

Some of our authors write in Russian – Isaac Babel and Dina Rubina (International bib.) and Daniel Kluger (Israeli bib.). G.K. George (International bib.) explores the struggles of Jewish revolutionaries in pre-1917 Russia. Sasha Margolis (International bib.) describes a barber-musician trying to save his shtetl from a pogrom in 1871. And the children of Russian Jews in western countries are the dramatic protagonists of several novels:

Jonathan Rabb, (“Shadow and Light”) – part of the Nikolai Hoffman trilogy about a half-Russian police detective in Weimar Germany [International bib.];

Reggie Nadelson, (“Red Hot Blues”) - part of the Artie Cohen series about a Moscow-born NYPD detective active in the heavily Russian Brighton Beach neighbourhood of Brooklyn [U.S. crime fiction bib.];

Michael Idov’s (“Cormorant Trilogy”) features Ari Falk, an American CIA agent with Russian expertise, dealing with spies and complex Russia vs. USA intrigues [U.S. crime fiction bib.];

A.J. Sidransky, (“Forgiving Stephen Redmond”) has Russian-Jewish detective, Tolya Kurchenko, solving murders in Washington Heights, New York City [U.S. crime fiction bib.];

Gabriel Cohen, (“Neptune Avenue”) - NYPD homicide detective, Jack Leightner, with a Russian-Jewish father, delves into the criminal enclaves of Crown Heights and Brighton Beach, New York City [U.S. crime fiction bib.];

Four of the five authors listed above have Russian-origin protagonists who are police officers, while the fifth is a CIA operative. And in addition:

Peter Golden, (“Wherever There Is Light”) - in which the American Jewish protagonist takes on the Soviet-era black market bosses in an attempt to avenge his grandmother’s murder, and encounters the legacy of the Holocaust and the lengths it forced people to go for the sake of survival. [U.S. crime fiction bib.]

Robert Littell, (“A Plague on Both Your Houses: A Novel in the Shadow of the Russian Mafia”) provides a Jewish crime boss, Naum Caplan, in Moscow! In other works, he depicts a young Russian-American, Alexander Til, who returns to Russia in order to participate in the Revolution (“The Revolutionist”) and offers a fictional account of Leon Trotsky’s 10-week sojourn in New York in early 1917 (“Bronshtein in the Bronx”). [U.S. crime fiction bib.]

Gary Shteyngart, (“The Russian Debutante’s Handbook”) has Vladimir Girshkin, a low-level Russian-Jewish immigrant clerk, stumble comically into involvement with Russian-Jewish American mafiosi. [U.S. crime fiction bib.]

Amy Bloom, (“Away”) -features Lillian Leyb, a Russian-Jewish immigrant to America who goes through a noirish landscape and criminal entanglements in her attempts to survive and find her missing daughter. [U.S. crime fiction bib.]

David Bezmozgis, (“Immigrant City “) Russian Jewish immigrants come to Canada and the U.S. with high hopes and intentions and get pulled into sordid jobs and underworld complicity [Canadian crime fiction bib.]

Talia Carner, (“Hotel Moscow: A Riveting Literary Thriller of Women, Heritage, and Conspiracy in Post-Communist Russia”) – the protagonist helps to train entrepreneurial Russian women in 1993. [U.S. crime fiction bib.]

Stuart Kaminsky (16-volume series starring Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov of the Moscow Police. He is not Jewish but his wife is, which exposes him and his family to the Russian anti-Semitism of the late 20^th century. [U.S. crime fiction bib.]

Bernard Malamud, (“The Fixer”) – a classic fictional presentation of the famous Beiliss blood libel case in late Tsarist Russia. [U.S. crime fiction bib.]

Edgardo Cozarinsky, (“The Moldavian Pimp” and “The Bride from Odessa”) – exposes the white slave trade of young Jewish women from the Pale of Settlement to South America.

Javier Sinay, (“The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America”) – dramatizes the struggles of the refugees from Czarist pogroms who sought a new beginning in Argentina, only to encounter new murderous enemies there.

2.19 Graphic Book Artists

Three are cited in our sample, in the U.S. Crime fiction bibliography: Will Eisner, Joe Kubert and David Hazan. Eisner and Kubert, born respectively in 1917 and 1926, were regarded as pioneers of the graphic book genre, and produced works with strong Jewish affirmation, with the American immigrant ghetto as a familiar setting. Physical violence and macho heroics pervade their works. David Hazan, whose birth-year is estimated as 1993, situates his story in a similar setting (Cleveland, 1936), even though his protagonist is not one of the Jewish gangsters but rather the bookkeeper who keeps their financial records.

2.20 Connection to Professional Sports

One of the classic avenues to upward mobility for first-generation children of immigrants is through professional sports. American and Canadian Jews produced many boxers and were prominent in the earliest years of organized basketball. The sports world was long a target of organized crime, particularly through its interest in the control of gambling. Two pertinent works on this subject are summarized in the non-fiction bibliography of American Jewish crime:

Ross, Ron, (Bummy Davis vs. Murder, Inc.: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Mafia and an Ill-Fated Prizefighter); and

Goodman, Matthew, (The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team)]

Max Allan Collins (“True Detective”) presents Nate Heller as a lifelong close friend of Bummy Davis, with whom he grew up on Maxwell Street in Chicago. Richard Rosen is the only fiction author in our sample to have made a former professional baseball player – Harvey Blissberg – into the detective protagonist of his mystery series (5 volumes). The penetration of major league baseball by criminal gambling interests is alluded to but not developed in this series, which focuses on the protagonist’s solution of specific murder cases. There is nothing close to the allegations levelled against Jewish gambling kingpin, Arnold Rothstein – never proved and in doubt to the very day – about fixing the results of the 1919 World Series by bribing several Chicago Black Sox players. Rosen also wrote a biography of Jewish football legend Sid Luckman, exploring his career and his father’s ties to organized crime.

Rosen, Richard D. (Strike Three You’re Dead) [-U.S. Jewish crime fiction bib.]

Rosen, Richard D., (Tough Luck: Sid Luckman, Murder, Inc., and the Rise of the Modern NFL [U.S. non-fiction Jewish crime bib.]

Pietrusza, David, (Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series)

See also the film, The Catcher Was A Spy (2018) in the Filmography list, about professional baseball catcher, Moe Berg, who spied for the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII.

The only other protagonist in our sample with a professional sports connection is Myron Bolitar, the sports agent at the center of Harlan Coben’s series (p.68). It begins with basketball-term titles like “Deal Breaker”, “Drop Shot”, “Fade Away” and “Back Spin”. Coben’s unconventional choice of an occupation for his protagonist, moreover one with a warm Jewish identity and family, generated the energy for a successful 12-volume series. Coben had himself played college basketball at Amherst College and he chose to make Myron a former Celtics first-round draft pick whose career was instantly shattered by a devastating knee injury. Forced to reinvent himself, Myron attends Harvard Law School and launches his sports rep agency. Elite athletes are often young, inexperienced, very rich and easy prey for unscrupulous characters, and Myron protects them, befriends them, and solves their murder mysteries along the way. His warm ethnic personality and Yiddish-flavoured humour make him a compelling guardian of his clients. By combining the high-stakes wheeling and dealing of professional sports with a grounded, protective Jewish family dynamic, Coben created a protagonist who can comfortably trade quips with mobsters, console a grieving mother, and still make it home in time to argue with his parents (in whose basement he continues to live for part of the series) about eating enough dinner. - Google/AI]

2.21 Reformed Jewish Gangsters

Not all Jewish gangsters were tough guys with limited consciences, and a small phenomenon of attempted repentance does make an appearance. In some cases, it leads to serious personal transformation, and in others it falls short, despite the protagonist’s efforts. Two books in the American Jewish non-fiction bibliography offer testimony in this vein:

Borovitz, Mark & Alan Eisenstock, (The Holy Thief: A Con Man’s Journey from Darkness to Light – An Uplifting Memoir: From Mobster to Rabbi )

Goldstein, Gary, (Jew in Jail)

Borovitz became a rabbi, Goldstein an author and motivational speaker.

Three somewhat related instances turn up in the American Jewish fiction bibliography:

DePoy, Phillip (Cold Florida) [Foggy Moskowitz, a former car thief and son of a hitman for the Jewish Mob, on the run from the Brooklyn authorities, ends up in Florida working for the Child Protective Service.]

Feldman, David E. (Let Thy Children Come) [Judah Hammer is a a former enforcer who rose to become a “local crime boss”, described as having a “heart of gold”. He is an ex-convict who, after serving time for manslaughter, attempts to protect his community while managing a sprawling, complicated family. Judah is not retired. His current criminal activities involve managing his territory and defending it against rival organizations.]

Shulman, Irving, (The Devil’s Knee) [A former brutal enforcer for the “Amboy Dukes” gang, Simon “Bull” Bronstein, is consumed with remorse for the bloody misdeeds of his youth, and seeks a new life as a penitent, religious Jew. In the end, he proves unable to truly change his nature, despite well-intentioned efforts, and reacts with extreme violence to an anti-Semitic street orator.]