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‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties
(New York Jewish Week) — The Geiks weren’t your typical Bronx working-class Jewish family.
One brother ran a mob-protected trucking company in Manhattan’s Garment District. Another brother, an NYPD detective, chauffeured organized crime couriers around the city with illicit cash. Their kid sister visited a Las Vegas casino where the tween was set up with a couple of slot machines in a private room.
And a close family friend was sent up the river for killing a notorious Jewish gangster.
Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik.
Dutch Schultz was the mob name of Arthur Flegenheimer, the Jewish bootlegger and numbers racket kingpin who left this mortal coil in October 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark. The triggermen were two Jews, members of the organized crime group Murder Inc. Mendy Weiss and Charles “Bug” Workman, the Uncle Charlie of the memoir’s title, did the hit.
Workman, who reportedly killed more than 20 people before pleading guilty to the murder of Dutch Schultz, was not a blood relative of author Alan Geik. But Workman grew up with Geik’s father on the Lower East Side and was so close to the Geik family he was considered an uncle. The author was in his 20s when he first met Workman, after the hitman was released from a New Jersey prison in 1964.
“I would never think of calling him anything but Uncle Charlie,” said Geik, 80, a retired TV producer and radio host who lives in Las Vegas.
In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence.
“These were people, from the first generation of Jews in America, who fought back against antisemitism in the streets,” Geik said. “Their parents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were not going to let it happen again and they didn’t.”
Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob, including “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” by Robert A. Rockaway, and “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” by Rich Cohen. Like those books, Geik’s family history provides a sort of reverse image of typical Jewish immigrant stories: Instead of scrapping their way up from New York’s Jewish enclaves into retail and the professions, Geik’s family joined a criminal counterculture.
Alan Geik’s family’s close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in a just-published memoir, “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz.” (Sonador Publishing)
Books such as Geik’s “really put a personal experience to this whole world that we all know about, the world of New York mobsters,” said Larry Henry, author of a monthly column for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “The public’s appetite for mob stories is insatiable.”
“Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz” describes a tangled family tree ripe with, well, rotten apples. Geik’s father, Lou, was not actually in the mob but did reap benefits from his ties with organized crime, Alan concedes. Lou Geik was one of several individuals who delivered mob cash to Workman’s family over 23 years.
“Uncle Charlie felt indebted to my father,” said Geik.
The author’s father is cited as a source for many of the anecdotes included in the memoir. Geik said that while his father’s business relied on mob protection, Lou Geik didn’t have “that extra whatever-it-took to be a really hardened criminal” — a trait, he said, his own older brother Bernard also lacked.
“My brother always wanted to be a gangland figure,” said Alan Geik. “So, instead my brother became a policeman.”
An ultimately very corrupt policeman. Bernard Geik joined the force in 1962 and resigned in 1971 after serving in the notorious Special Investigative Unit, which, as depicted in the book and the motion picture “Prince of the City,” devolved into an extortion ring. After resigning from the NYPD, Bernard Geik was arrested for bribery and bribe-taking in 1974. He reportedly pleaded guilty but served no time.
The disgraced detective went to work at his father’s trucking company. According to the author, his brother was one of the detectives provided by a supervisor to drive their Uncle George and other mobsters around town when they were transporting mob money in New York.
Uncle George Gordon was a real uncle. Gordon is allegedly one of the gangsters the actor George Raft modeled himself after for his roles in 1930s and ’40s crime melodramas. For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana.
Alan Geik isn’t the only keeper of his family’s convoluted story. His sister Iris has her own memories of growing up mob-adjacent, such as when she and her parents were Gordon’s guests at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas when the mob was running its casino and skimming cash from the profits. Gordon wanted Lou Geik to work there.
According to Iris, Gordon posted a guard outside a private room in which she had been ensconced with a couple of slot machines. The 13-year-old was “mesmerized” by the slot machines. Her mother was initially unaware of what was going on.
“Uncle Charlie” Workman, seen in 1941, pled guilty to the 1935 murder of mobster Dutch Schultz and was given a life sentence. (NYPD)
“I was having a blast,” Iris Geik said. “I’ll never forget when the door flung open and my itty-bitty mother came in with a big guard behind her. She immediately made me stop [playing with the slot machine] and give back the money I had won.”
Iris Geik, now a privacy lawyer in the Boston area, has written hundreds of pages of her own memoir about the wives and girlfriends of the Jewish gangsters, tentatively titled, “The View From the Women’s Table.”
“Their lives were complex but they were also heimische Jewish women,” she said, using the Yiddish word for cozy and familiar. She and her father eloped because they were a mixed couple: Her mother Reba was a Sephardic Jew and her father was Ashkenazi.
Geik remembered that as a child she noticed a newspaper article about a family friend being arrested. She said, “Mom! Mom! Look, we’re famous.” To which her mother replied, “That’s infamous, dear.”
Geik said that on several occasions her mother observed: “There are no second-generation Jewish mobsters. Jews don’t make gangsters out of their children.”
Reba Geik had been involved in caring for two of Iris’ aunts who lived in Brooklyn while they were dying. Those acts of kindness had a profound impact on Uncle George, the casino supervisor.
After the aunts passed away, Gordon always stood when Reba entered a room, Iris said. “My mother was very honored by that because he was such a big shot.”
Throughout her life, Reba Geik remained close to Sylvia Lorber, a friend from her teenage years. Lorber was the only mob mistress her mother would spend time with, said Iris. Lorber was the paramour of two Jewish gangsters: Benny Kassop, the brother of Murder, Inc. gunman Sammy Kassop, and Sam “Red” Levine, an observant Jew who wore a kippah under his fedora. Levine won the affection of Lorber while the Kassop brothers were in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.
“Sylvia was a hell of a lot of fun but my mother worried about her,” Iris said. “Sylvia told me her stories, which were kind of glamorous when she was young but sad when she was older.” After spending 20 years with Levine, Lorber couldn’t attend his funeral. Sylvia Lorber stopped talking to Reba Geik in her last years.
Jewish gangsters do, on occasion, display some altruism in Alan Geik’s memoir. Take Moe Dalitz, the head of the Cleveland Syndicate. He was a major bootlegger during Prohibition whose flotillas of illegal liquor on the Great Lakes came to be known as The Little Jewish Navy. His family ran legitimate laundry businesses in Boston and Detroit. Too old to be drafted during World War II, he enlisted at the age of 42 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Dalitz ran the military laundry service on New York’s Governor’s Island — but declined to bunk in the island’s barracks, opting instead to stay at a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park.
Then there was Johnny Eder, a major source for Geik’s narrative. Eder was part of the Lower East Side teenage crime crew that included Uncle Charlie and Uncle George. As an adult he was a major fence for stolen jewelry and always had a bag of stolen rings on him. Eder also had many connections at City Hall and in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
According to Geik’s account, Eder was the mob’s representative to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine. Eder arranged meetings in the noisy kitchen of the Copacabana, a mob hangout, between Haganah agents and mobsters and others described as “former wartime U.S. intelligence agents” working to secure weapons for Israel’s War of Independence. (The late Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s longtime mayor, would tell a story about passing cash to an intermediary at the Copacabana, who brought the money to an Irish sea caption with a ship full of munitions bound for the Holy Land. The bagman, according to Kollek, was Frank Sinatra.)
Author Alan Geik’s father-in-law, Lou Lenart, left, and other fighter pilots in front of Avia-S-199 plane. Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to the Holy Land for use in the War of Independence. (Courtesy of Boaz Dvir)
Alan Geik has a very personal connection to the creation of the Jewish state. His late wife Nina was the daughter of Lou Lenart, a World War II fighter pilot who served in the U.S. Marines. Geik’s memoir details how the elder Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to Palestine for use in Israel’s War of Independence. Lenart’s story was featured in Nancy Spielberg’s 2014 documentary “Above and Beyond,” about the creation of the Israeli air force.
The story of how Jewish gangsters used some violent muscle against Nazi sympathizers in New York has been told before in historical accounts, but one episode in Geik’s memoir is particularly dramatic. A pair of Jews attended a Bund rally at Camp Siegfried on Long Island, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology, and were offered a ride back to the city by a Nazi sympathizer who they ended up beating senseless in Brooklyn.
Alan Geik was not really hungry when he met Meyer Lansky at a Central Park hotel in the late 1950s. The gangster asked the 15-year-old nephew of George Gordon if he wanted a pastrami sandwich. Geik declined. Then Lansky, who struck Geik as an “older Jewish man who I knew was really powerful,” suggested that they split one. It was an offer that Geik did not refuse.
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The post ‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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One university canceled Hasan Piker. Another has him going to the chapel tonight.
University of Washington canceled him. University of Texas offered limited seating. On Thursday, Cornell University will open the doors of its historic chapel to host Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing pundit with a history of antisemitic comments.
Three universities, three different receptions for the far-left Twitch streamer who has attracted millions of fans with his raw rhetoric that has veered, on more than one occasion, into antisemitism. Most recently, Piker warned American Jews who “keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel,” that someone could eventually “take action against” them.
Universities seem torn about whether – and how – to host him. Jewish campus groups are divided too. Jewish Voice for Peace invited Piker to Cornell, along with other student groups, while Cornellians for Israel opposed his appearance.
A statement released by leaders of Hillel at Cornell University emphasized their commitment to the campus as a place for disagreement, pluralism and debate, but put Piker in a different category.
“Mr. Piker’s views… go against our values as Americans and Jews, and his hateful, antisemitic rhetoric is repulsive,” the statement said.
That outrage has not discouraged campus groups including College Democrats, democratic socialists and pro-Palestinian organizations from booking the rising influencer, who has campaigned with a number of progressive Democratic candidates leading up to the midterm election. They say Piker, 35, is the voice their generation needs to hear to get out the vote.
“This is a guy that has a modern media presence,” one student told the Yale Daily News when Piker appeared there in April. “He reaches to our demographic exactly, people that are our age.”
But Piker, who told students that empathy was the core philosophical underpinnings of his political beliefs, has laughed at the suggestion that campus antisemitism is on the rise. In one livestream, he called a Jewish man a “bloodthirsty, violent pig dog,” accusing him of wanting to execute every Palestinian in the street. In another, discussing efforts to compel ultra-Orthodox Jews to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, he described them as “inbred.”
At Northwestern University, where he appeared in March, a student asked Piker how to talk about the Middle East conflict with his Zionist friends without ending the friendship.
“I think you shouldn’t give up on your friends and try to have normal conversations with them about how they probably don’t care about Israel as much as they think they do,” Piker responded, according to The Daily Northwestern, “because if they did, they’d probably live there.”
In his remarks at Yale, Piker called the wars that have cemented America’s imperial roots “an endless series of butcheries, each more perverse and more tragic than the last.”
“What was the point of defeating the Nazis if we went on to dominate so much of the globe as violently as we have?”
‘Heckler’s veto’
Ryan Ansloan, senior program counsel in the policy reform department of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), says those comments are not enough to bar Piker from speaking on campus.
Ansloan warns against canceling or preventing events based on what is known as a “heckler’s veto,” or the possibility that a percentage of the campus community is not going to like it.
“Ultimately it sends a bad message to the campus community that if you complain enough or threaten to disrupt an event you don’t like, you can get your way and prevent that event from even taking place,” he told the Forward. “That has implications that go beyond that single event and can have a chilling effect. As long as that student body remains on campus, that incident is going to stick in their minds.”
Conservatives have long championed free speech on campus, often accusing activists on the left of wielding safety concerns to disinvite alt-right speakers to campuses. Think British far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and his tour a decade ago; or Ann Coulter, who was harassed off the stage coincidentally at Cornell, her alma mater.
But since the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last year, safety has been raised by activists on both sides of the political aisle, Ansloan said. According to FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database, many objections are tied to speakers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For example, after opposition from the right, the University of Southern Maine in February revoked seven invitations and canceled a one-day conference titled “The Consequence of Palestine.”
Around that same time, the Catholic University of America rejected a request from the campus chapter of the Students Supporting Israel (SSI) to host U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, a Jewish congressman from Florida, who has drawn public condemnation for his anti-Muslim rhetoric, and Dany Tirza, a retired IDF colonel and security fence architect to speak on the West Bank barrier.
With Piker, outrage has paled to the demand. At Cornell, tickets for Piker’s appearance in the 600-seat university chapel were claimed within hours of their release. Piker also will be live streaming the event on his Twitch channel.
At the University of Texas, University Democrats planned to host the Sept. 30 event in a 466-seat auditorium, but 2,500 people signed up. Despite suggestions from campus police to find a larger venue, the university has not been willing to provide one with more space.
“This has the potential to be the largest political event in Austin since like 2018,” the group’s president Adit Raha told a local TV station, adding that he hasn’t ruled out shifting the event off campus.
“This event will be happening no matter what. We’re not going to cancel the event.”
But even Democratic politicians in Texas are concerned.
“Free speech allows difficult and controversial views, but it does not require anyone to stay silent when someone has a history of hateful comments about Jewish Americans, 9/11 and Hamas terrorism,” U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) wrote on X. “Jewish students at UT should not be made to feel targeted or unsafe on their own campus.”
Cancellation was the solution at the University of Washington for an upcoming talk in January 2027. While the university insisted in a statement that it’s “dedicated to the free exchange of ideas, including on controversial topics and involving provocative speakers,” it reviewed the process by which the Piker lecture was planned and determined it along with six other events “did not meet the necessary level of rigor for University-hosted events in the Speaker Series.”
A university spokesman clarified that those seven invitations, including Piker’s, did not undergo the committee review. No effort has been made to reschedule Piker and submit the invitation for review.
The statement continued: “Going forward, procedures will be updated to ensure the standards we have for University-hosted events like the Speaker Series are met, particularly so that we can help elevate the level of dialogue on divisive topics during a polarized time in our country.”
The post One university canceled Hasan Piker. Another has him going to the chapel tonight. appeared first on The Forward.
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Hundreds rally at United Nations to urge world leaders to address antisemitism
(JTA) — Hundreds of members of New York’s Jewish community competed against stand-still traffic, security details and dozens of black SUVs Wednesday night to reach Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza near the United Nations.
Their plea? For world leaders at the global body’s annual General Assembly to take antisemitic violence seriously.
“This week world leaders are gathered in our city, right down the street at the United Nations, to discuss global challenges,” Eric Goldstein, CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York, said in his opening remarks. “But we know that they are not addressing the rampant proliferation of antisemitism across the world.”
Organized by UJA and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, the evening rally featured a number of interfaith speakers, as well as survivors of various antisemitic hate crimes around the world from Nova to Bondi Beach.
Devorah Halberstam, whose son Ari was murdered on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994 in a terror attack, gave an impassioned speech, imploring world leaders to “tell your people: Take this message back to your countries. Antisemitism must stop. Not tomorrow. Not when it becomes politically expedient. Right now.”
A number of speakers Wednesday night criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, questioning whether he could truly be a mayor to New York City’s Jews who fundamentally disagree with him on Israel. Others, like Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called out a more general “deliberate passivity in the face of antisemitism,” likening it to complicity.
Also speaking Wednesday was George Zamot, a UPS driver who intervened in July’s stabbing attack on the Upper West Side, in which a Jewish man and an Asian man were injured.
While some speakers focused on the dangers of antisemitism, a few addressed moments of community that resulted from such terrible events.
In a display of unity, Nova music festival survivor Shalev Biton gave remarks while also translating the remarks of Younes Alkarnawi, the Bedouin man who saved his life.
The rally’s audience dwindled as the evening wore on, and a small group of counterprotestors from the anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta became increasingly loud.
The demonstration follows recent public gatherings addressing antisemitism in New York City, including a contentious prayer vigil held by two Orthodox Jewish day schools outside the mayor’s home of Gracie Mansion last week.
It also marks a pivot toward more community advocacy within the scope of UJA’s work. (70 Faces Media, the parent company of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and New York Jewish Week, receives UJA funding.)
In an interview earlier this week with eJewishPhilanthropy, UJA’s executive vice president for community strategy and external relations Hindy Poupko called the Wednesday evening rally “an attempt to ensure that our narrative doesn’t get drowned out during this U.N. week.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hundreds rally at United Nations to urge world leaders to address antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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How Russian and Austrian politics gave rise to modern Yiddish literature
פֿון װאַנען האָט זיך גענומען די מאָדערנע ליטעראַטור אױף ייִדיש און העברעיִש? ביז הײַנט האָט מען געהאַלטן, אַז זי איז געװען אַ פּועל־יוצא פֿון דער השׂכּלה־אידעאָלאָגיע, װאָסער ציל איז געװען צו דערציִען די ייִדישע מאַסן אינעם גײַסט פֿון דער אײראָפּעיִשער אױפֿקלערונג־קולטור.
עופֿר דינעס (קאָלאַמביע־אוניװערסיטעט) האַלט, אַז אַ װיכטיקע ראָלע אין דער אַנטוויקלונג פֿון דער מאָדערנער ליטעראַטור בײַ ייִדן האָט געשפּילט די נײַע קאָלאָניאַלע פּאָליטיק פֿון די רוסישע און עסטרײַכישע אימפּעריעס נאָך די צעטײלונגען פֿון פּױלן סוף־18טן יאָרהונדערט.
אונטער דער אַלטער פּױלישער מאַכט האָבן ייִדישע יחידים ניט געהאַט קײן דירעקטן שײכות צו דער מלוכה. די קהילות האָבן זיך געפֿירט לױט זײערע אײגענע תּקנות און מנהגים, און זײער קאָלעקטיװער פֿאָרשטײער פֿאַר דער מלוכה איז געװען דער װעד ארבע ארצות (די פֿאַרװאַלטונג פֿון פֿיר לענדער).
די נײַע אימפּעריאַלע מלוכות האָבן אָפּגעשאַפֿן דעם דאָזיקן רעזשים און גענומען אײַנפֿירן אַלגעמײנע געזעץ־געבונג פֿאַר אַלע אונטערטאַנער זײערע, ייִדן בתוכם. דינעסעס בוך באַשרײַבט ווי אַזוי די משׂכּילים האָבן גענומען אױף זיך די אױפֿגאַבע צו דערקלערן די דאָזיקע פּאָליטיק פֿאַר די ייִדישע מאַסן דורך זײערע ליטעראַרישע װערק.
דאָס קעפּל פֿון דינערס בוך לאָזט זיך ניט גענױ איבערזעצן אױף ייִדיש. דאָס ענגלישע װאָרט fiction האָט צװײ פֿאַרשײדענע באַטײַטן: בעלעטריסטיק און פֿיקציע, און זײ בײדע באַלאַנגען צו דעם מײן פֿונעם קעפּל: “די בעלעטריסטיק/פֿיקציע פֿון דער מלוכה“.
דורך זײערע בעלעטריסטישע װערק, האַלט דינעס, האָבן די משׂכּילישע מחברים געשאַפֿן אַן אידעאַליזירטן אימאַזש, אַ „פֿיקציע“, פֿון דער גוטװיליקער מלוכישער מאַכט, װאָס זאָרגט זיך װעגן דעם װױלזײַן פֿון אַלע אירע אונטערטאַנער.
די דאָזיקע פּאָזיציע האָט פֿאָרמולירט ישׂראל אַקסענפֿעלד (1787־1866) אין „דאָס שטערנטיכל“, דעם ערשטן ייִדישן ראָמאַן: „דאָס פּױלישע ביטערע אָנגעבלאָזענע גדלות, די פּױלישע גאװה איז בײַם רוס ניטאָ. אַ רוס, אַז ער קען זיך מיט אַ ייִדן און האָט מיט אים עטלעכע מאָל צו טאָן, רופֿט ער אים ׳בראַט׳’ [ברודער]. אַפֿילו דער פֿאַקטאָר [קאָמיסיאָנער], אַז ער [דער ייִד] דינט אים געטרײַ, האָט ער אים ליב.“
דינעסעס העלדן זײַנען פֿאַרשײדענע פֿיגורן. אײניקע זײַנען באַרימט, װי דער „זײדע“ פֿון דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור, שלום־יעקבֿ אַבראַמאָװיטש (מענדעלע מוכר ספֿרים); דער גאַליציאַנער משׂכּיל יוסף פּערל און רבי נחמן פֿון בראַצלעװ.
אַנדערע זײַנען שוין כּמעט פֿאַרגעסן געװאָרן, װי דער העברעיִשער דיכטער משה אלחנן — דער מחבר פֿון צװײ העברעיִשע לױבגעזאַנגען. אײן שיר איז געװען געװידמעט דעם פּױלישן קעניג און דער צװײטער — דעם רוסישן צאַר. אַ צווייטער בײַשפּיל איז דער עסטרײַכישער באַאַמטער יאָהאַן עדואַרד זאַק, דער פֿאַרפֿאַסער פֿון אַ סאַטירישן ראָמאַן, װאָס מאַכט חוזק פֿון די גאַליציאַנער חסידים.
עס איז גוט באַקאַנט, אַז די משׂכּילים, בפֿרט דער טאַרנעפּאָלער סוחר יוסף פּערל, האָבן אין זײערע סאַטירישע חיבורים אױסגעלאַכט די חסידים..
אָבער מיט דער צײַט האָט פּערל דערזען, אַז דאָס איז ניט גענוג פֿאַר באַקעמפֿן די השפּעה פֿון חסידות. ער האָט זיך גענומען מסרן זײ צו די עסטרײַכישע אינסטאַנצן דורך זײַנע ליטעראַרישע װערק. װײַזט אױס, אַז די עסטרײַכישע פּאָליצײ האָט געהאַט מומחים, װאָס האָבן געקענט לײענען ייִדיש און העברעיִש.
להיפּוך צו די משׂכּילים, זײַנען די חסידים ניט געװען אײַנשטימיק אין זײער באַצי צו דער רוסישער אימפּעריע. דער גרעסטער אָנהענגער פֿון רוסלאַנד איז געװען דער גרינדער פֿונעם חב״ד, ר׳ שניאור זלמן פֿון ליאַדי. ער האָט געהאַלטן, אַז די קאָנסערװאַטיװע רוסישע פּאָליטיק העלפֿט באַשיצן ייִדישקײט קעגן די נײַע מערבֿדיקע אידעען.
ר׳ נחמן פֿון בראַצלעװ האָט געהאַט אַן אַנדער דעה. כּסדר האַלט מען זײַנע סיפּורי־מעשׂיות פֿאַר מיסטישע אַלעגאָריעס. אַ סך פֿון זײ דערצײלן װעגן אַ מלך און זײַן מלוכה. אַלעגאָריש טײַטשט מען דאָס אױס װי דער רבונו של עולם און די באַשאַפֿענע װעלט זײַנע.
אָבער דינעס לײענט די דאָזיקע מעשׂיות דורך אַ היסטאָרישן פּאָליטישן שפּאַקטיװ. ער האַלט, אַז צו מאָל איז דער מלך טאַקע פּשוט אַ קעניג און זײַן קעניגרײַך איז אַן עכטע מלוכה.
ר׳ נחמנס קריטיק פֿון דער נײַער אימפּעריאַלער פּאָליטיק איז ספּעציעל בולט אין דער „מעשׂה ממלך שגזר שמד“ („מעשׂה װעגן אַ קעניג װאָס האָט באַפֿוילן שמד“), װאָס מאָלט אױס אַ דעספּאָטישן מאָנאַרך.
דורך זײַנע אַלעגאָריעס האָט ר׳ נחמן געפּרוּװט דערקלערן זײַנע חסידים, אַז די נײַע רוסישע בעלי־בתּים זײַנען אױסן מװתּר צו זײַן די אױטאָנאָמיע, װאָס די ייִדישע קהילות האָבן גענאָסן אונטער דער פּױלישער מאַכט.
ר׳ נחמנס כּװנה, האַלט דינעס, איז געװען צו באַשיצן ייִדן פֿון דער נײַער מאַכט. צוליב דעם האָט ער ספּעציעל אױסגעקליבן די שטאָט בראַצלעװ (בראַסלעװ) אין פּאָדאָליע פֿאַר זײַן רעזידענץ, װײַל דאָס איז געװען אַן אַדמיניסטראַטיװער קרײַז־צענטער.
ר׳ נחמן האָט געהאָפֿט, אַז בראַצלעװ װעט זײַן „די פֿאַבריק פֿון ייִדישקײט“, און אַזױ אַרום „װעט די גאַנצע װעלט ווערן בראַסלאַװער חסידים“. די דאָזיקע װערטער האָט פֿאַרשריבן זײַן געטרײַער תּלמיד ר׳ נתן שטײנהאַרץ.
דינעס איז אַ געניטער דערצײלער. אױף די זײַטן פֿון זײַן בוך טרעפֿן זיך פּױלישע פּריצים, רוסישע מיליטער־לײַט, עסטרײַכישע פּאָליצײ און כּל־מיני ייִדן: משׂכּילים, חסידים, משומדים. ער אַנטפּלעקט פֿאַרכאַפּנדיקע פּרטים און אומשטאַנדן, װאָס לאָזן אױף ס׳נײַ אױסטײַטשן ליטעראַרישע טעקסטן.
סוף־18טן און אָנהײב־19טן יאָרהונדערט איז געװען אַ שטורעמדיקע תּקופֿה איבער גאַנץ אײראָפּע. די צעטײלונגען פֿון פּױלן און דערנאָך די מלחמות קעגן נאַפּאָלעאָנישן פֿראַנקרײַך האָבן שטאַרק געענדערט די פּאָליטישע מאַפּע פֿון מיטל־ און מזרח־אײראָפּע.
די דאָזיקע דראַמאַטישע געשעענישן האָבן פֿאַרטיפֿט דעם שפּאַלט אינעם פּױלישן ייִדנטום. די העכערע שיכטן, פֿאַרמעגלעכע שטאָטישע בעלי־בתּים, האָבן לרובֿ געשטיצט די נײַע פּאָליטיק און געצױגן נוצן פֿון דער לעגאַלער אָרדענונג אין רוסלאַנד און עסטרײַך.
אָבער די אָרעמע שטעטלדיקע מאַסן, בפֿרט חסידים, האָבן חושד געווען, אַז די נײַע מאַכט מאַכט וועט זיך אַרײַנמישן אין זײער עסקים כּדי אָפּצוציִען ייִדן פֿון ייִדישקײט.
בײדע צדדים האָבן גענומען פֿאַרשפּרײטן זײערע אידעען דורך ליטעראַרישע טעקסטן אין פֿאַרשײדענע זשאַנערס, אַזעלכע װי מעשׂיות, לידער, ראָמאַנען און סאַטירישע פּאַמפֿלעטן. און פֿון אָט די דאָזיקע װיכּוחים איז אױסגעװאַקסן די מאָדערנע צװײ־שפּראַכיקע ייִדישע ליטעראַטור.
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