How the Other Half Lives

How the Other Half Lives occupies a premier place on a small list of American books—along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, and Unsafe at Any Speed—that changed public opinion, influenced public policy, and left an indelible mark on history.

Hasia R. Diner is Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History and Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University. She is the author of The Jews of the United States, 1645 to 2000; Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration; Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present; The Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America; In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935; and A Time for Gathering, 1820-1880: The Second Migration (Volume 2 of The Jewish People of America, edited by Henry Feingold) and coeditor of Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections.