Walkers in the City showcases the distinctive urban vision that working-class Jewish photographers produced on New York City’s streets and in public spaces in the middle decades of the 20th century.

Drawing on their experiences, Deborah Dash Moore offers a new perspective on New York as seen through their eyes—a cityscape of working-class people. With their cameras, these photographers pictured Gotham’s abrasive social milieu and its fleeting textures and light, creating an archive of vernacular images of city life and a distinctive tradition of street photography that became widely imitated.

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DEBORAH DASH MOORE served as the Jonathan Freedman Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, specializing in twentieth-century urban American Jewish history. Her recent book, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-Century New York (2023) is a winner of a National Jewish Book Award. Currently, she serves as editor in chief of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of original sources translated into English from the biblical period to 2005.