The Last of the Ellis Island Jews: A Brooklyn Memoir with Joel Dinerstein (SUNY Press, 2026)

September 29, 2026

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5 min read

In the schoolyard in Brooklyn in 1971, three white teenagers walked up to Joel Dinerstein and his friends and asked: if there were a button that would eliminate all Black people from the planet, would you push it? Dinerstein’s first thought was Talmudic—you’re not even allowed to ask such a question. That moment, and the questions it raised about race, ethnicity, and belonging, never left him. It became one of the seeds of his new memoir, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews: A Brooklyn Memoir, a book that tries to recover a lost world of Jewish American life before the Holocaust and Israel became the twin poles of Jewish identity.

The Lost World of Ellis Island Jews

Dinerstein uses “Ellis Island Jews” literally: the roughly 2.5 million Jewish immigrants who came through Ellis Island between 1884 and 1924, when the immigration law changed. More than 75% of Jewish Americans descend from that migration, but Dinerstein argues that the texture of their lives—the vibrant, urban, working-class neighborhood culture—has been largely erased from public memory. “The conversation about Jewish people and culture for the last two generations has been around Holocaust and Israel,” he says. “This has sort of been lost to public memory.”

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What you'll learn

1 (03:22) **Why a Brooklyn Memoir of Lost Worlds** - Dinerstein explains the core mission: to restore public memory of the vibrant, urban, working-class Jewish neighborhood life that defined the first half of the 20th century, a period he argues has been overshadowed by the Holocaust and Israel in Jewish American discourse.
2 (05:19) **Family Migration: Escape from Pogroms, Arrival Before the 1924 Law** - Dinerstein traces his parents’ separate arrivals as children around 1923, fleeing the race riots (pogroms) in Russia.
3 (08:12) **Growing Up in a Lost World: The 15-Minute City** - He contrasts his 1950s-60s Brooklyn with today’s gentrified version, emphasizing a vibrant, affordable working-class life where everything was within walking distance.
4 (10:42) **Comic Iconic Scenes of Jewish Ritual** - Dinerstein shares how almost every major ritual scene in his life had a comic twist, from friends getting thrown out of his bar mitzvah to a Seder where his grandfather tricked the grandkids.
5 (13:11) **Mother’s Creative Language: “Hero in His Pajamas”** - Dinerstein recounts his mother’s idiosyncratic Yiddish pronunciations and her made-up compound words.
6 (15:00) **Sports as Counter-Narrative to Jewish Caricatures** - He describes forming an undefeated, half-Jewish pickup football team that won 14 games, a point of pride that contradicts Hollywood’s nerdy caricatures of Jewish men.
7 (17:30) **The Organic Questions About Race That Shaped a Career** - Dinerstein explains how his predominantly black and Afro-Caribbean junior high and high school led him to ask intellectual questions about race from age 13.

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Show Notes

Joel Dinerstein's The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (SUNY Press, 2026) is a tragicomic memoir of a dysfunctional, working-class Brooklyn Jewish family that illuminates both the vitality of urban life in the twentieth century and the social turmoil of white flight. As a child of immigrants born to older parents, Dinerstein has a unique perspective on four generations--from his grandparents escaping Russia's pogroms to his parents' embattled marriage to his older Boomer siblings (split between feminist and Republican politics) to his own hippie hopes. As a white teenager in majority Black public schools, Dinerstein's firsthand experience led to his academic career as a scholar of race and music. Yet his family fits no paradigm of Jewish success due to a father with rage and gambling problems, resulting in the four siblings escaping early to the Brooklyn streets. As a family growing up with a diasporic identity, the Dinersteins provide a primer of ethnic Jewish culture through iconic scenes: a selfish Seder, a chaotic Bar Mitzvah, a videotaped bris, an allergy attack at Dachau, a staring contest with the Rebbe. Most of all, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews is a chronicle of lost worlds.

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