Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams Book

Okay, Cohen can write. His prose is fantastic -- moody and evocative and memorable. I loved his book on Da Bears, for example, and ask me how much I care about football. His style is particularly well-suited to dreamy remembrances about gritty New York gangsters and days long gone.

But. A++ prose aside, I'm not sure where to even start with the problems I had with this book. It's definitely not about Jewish gangsters, so much as it is about Rich Cohen and his love affair with Jewish gangsters. In the pictures section, for example, there are photos of gangsters, and photos of Cohen dressed up like one. There's a lot of "I imagine he might have sighed heavily" and "I can picture him sitting on the arm of the sofa like my first girlfriend's father." It's not anything that happened, just what Cohen thinks maybe could have happened. But, okay. Not really what I was looking for, but okay.

Except that there are a lot of statements and assumptions that are just plain bizarre. He never sees anything other than what he's already decided to see. Permeating the entire book is a frustration with Jew As Brainy Weakling and a desire to romanticize Tough Jew in order for the kids these days to have some options. Fine, except in doing so Cohen ignores a few decades of writers finding and romanticizing Nazi hunters and gangsters and the Masada martyrs and the Mossad and and and. The main scholarly work on Jewish gangsters, Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900-1940, is not in his bibliography.

He also makes some super questionable statements, like when he's talking about the girlfriend of one gangster being raped and refers to it as said gangster's "own personal Night of Broken Glass." What? No. Just no.

But the thing that made me crankiest, while reading, was the part halfway through the book where he's like "no one has heard of Jewish gangsters" as if there aren't people who have weird obsessions with gangsters and then "and if even if you have heard of Jewish gangsters, you definitely have not heard of Jewish drug dealers!" Then he names, as his premier example of a Jewish drug dealer no one has ever heard of... Arnold Fucking Rothstein. Really? Come ON. COME ON. DUDE WAS THE MOSES OF THE UNDERWORLD. NO HISTORY OF THE MOB IN AMERICA IS COMPLETE WITHOUT ROTHSTEIN. IF YOU'RE READING THIS BOOK, YOU HAVE HEARD OF ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN, IF ONLY BECAUSE THERE IS AN ENTIRE CHAPTER ABOUT HIM EARLIER IN THE BOOK.

Yes, that is what got me the most worked up, right there. You're welcome.