Kosher Nostra

In this excellent two-volume book/art catalog “Kosher Nostra. Jewish gangsters in America 1890-1980“ Oz Almog, an internationally recognized Austrian/Israeli artist, presents aspects of the history of organized crime in the USA, which non-experts mostly associate with “godfathers” from Italy. The Mafia and the gangs generally came from poor immigrant communities, and the gangster were of Italian, Irish and Jewish descent, e.g. Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy“ Siegel, Dutch Schultz or Louis “Lepke“ Buchhalter. In more than 160 masterly painted, realistic oil portraits Oz Almog depicts the ambiguous character of the protagonists of this specific aspect of Jewish history. Most of personalities are shown both an face and from profile - it is an artistic "fact-finding mission" without any trace of neither glorification nor condemnation. Each painting is accompanied with a short description from original FBI files in English, while the rest of the texts are in German. In the Vol 2, Oz Almog gives us a comprehensive photo documentation of life and death in the underground. It is real pity there is no fully English version of this book.