The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: An Evening with Margalit Fox

Who knew that America’s first great organized-crime lord was a nice Jewish mother? In 1850, young, impoverished Fredericka Mandelbaum arrived in New York by steerage and began peddling street goods. By the mid-1880s, $10 million in purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) was passing through her Lower East Side shop. Mrs. Mandelbaum wasn’t just a crook: she was among the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize property crime. Join author Margalit Fox as she upends expectations while presenting Gilded Age New York, with its nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers, and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and “legitimate” commerce in this unforgettable true story, selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

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