Word: brooklyn
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Autobiographer and Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi was raised on the rim of Borough Park, a section of Brooklyn then heavily populated with deeply religious Holocaust survivors and their American-born children. His father, who came from a small Hungarian village, escaped the death camps by fleeing into the forest, where he hid for a year in a 4-ft.-deep hole. Even as a successful candy wholesaler in the U.S., he felt hunted and angry, especially at the "Nice Irvings," his term for America's assimilated Jews who laughed at Borscht Belt humor and turned, as he said...
...teenager in Brooklyn in the early 1970s, raised on stories from my father about hiding from the Nazis in a hole in the earth, I was drawn to the extremist politics of Meir Kahane and his Jewish Defense League. I felt certain I inhabited an anti-Semitic world whose true intentions toward the Jews were unmasked at Auschwitz. I divided all of non-Jewish humanity into only two categories: those who actively try to destroy the Jewish people and those who silently applaud them...
...overcome tremendous obstacles. My favorite interviews are not with heads of state or celebrities, but with people like [paralyzed policeman] Steven McDonald or the pitcher [and cancer victim] Dave Dravecky. In fact, one of my first interviews for the Today show was with a blind and deaf poet in Brooklyn...
PHILIP BANKS DEVELOPED HIS BELIEF IN the "long arm of supervision" while growing up in Harlem and Brooklyn. Even when his father, a truck driver, was away on a trip and his mother was off cleaning other people's homes, neighbors would come over to supervise, scold and soothe. "You always felt like someone was watching," recalls Banks, 53. When he became a father of three boys, he kept close watch and joined the neighborhood block association to help others. His strategy for keeping his children out of trouble: Stick close. "I went to school on PTA night. If there...
...pretty tough on us," says his eldest son David. "And thank God he was." While other neighborhood boys in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn saw their futures disintegrate in a haze of drugs, crime and broken homes, the three Banks boys thrived. Today David, 33, is a lawyer who switched careers and became an assistant elementary-school principal; Philip III, 32, has followed his dad into the police force; and Terence, 30, has started a pest-control company. Banks' three sons all live in Queens, not far from their parents' three-bedroom English Tudor home. All four Banks...