Join AJHS, YIVO, and New Lehrhaus for a discussion with Walkers in the City Author Deborah Dash Moore and Manhattan Borough Historian Robert W. Snyder.

In the middle of the twentieth century, good cameras became smaller and lighter, enabling street photographers to roam alleyways, ride elevated trains and subways, and stroll beaches in summertime to capture daily life with urgency and intimacy. Walkers in the City showcases the distinctive urban vision that working-class Jewish photographers produced with these new cameras on New York City’s streets and in public spaces.

Drawing on the experiences of and photographs by a generation of young Jewish photographers who belonged to the New York Photo League, Deborah Dash Moore offers a new perspective on New York as seen through their eyes—a cityscape of working-class people and democratizing public transit. With their cameras, they pictured Gotham’s abrasive social milieu and its evanescent textures and light, creating an archive of vernacular images of city life and a distinctive tradition of street photography that would be widely imitated.

Walkers in the City documents how these roving, imaginative New Yorkers, entranced by the medium of photography, transformed everyday sights into rousing, joyous, and poignant moments of time, creating visual poetry out of the fabric of social life.

For in-person attendees, books are available for preorder at the ticketing link or can be purchased onsite at the event.

This event is co- sponsored with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and New Lehrhaus: The Bay Area Hub for Adult Jewish Learning.