WELCOME
to the (mostly) professional website of Jonathan Ezra Goldman, literature/cultural history professor by day, sometime musician by night. I created this site as a one-stop portal for the various projects I've had going on over the past few years, some completed, some in progress.
THE BIG NEWS
My new book, Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York from the Suppressed to the Strange (SUNY Press, 2026) is now available for pre-order! (Click here.)
This book is a culmination of years of research about 1920s NYC, some of which you can find on my website New York 1920s: One Hundred Years Ago Today, When We Became Modern.
Professor at NYIT
As full professor at New York Institute of Technology, I teach writing and courses about literature and culture (US, Latinx, British and Irish). While my new book looks closely at 1920s New York City, my scholarship in general has mostly addressed literature and its relationship to mass, technological society during what is sometimes called "the long 20th Century" (roughly 1850 to the present)—in transatlantic and diasporic contexts. My sub-specialties include modernism, literature/law studies, New York City cultural history, James Joyce, the history of the novel, visual culture, celebrity, popular music, and comics.
Looking for Jonathan Goldman-sound healer, or Jonathan Goldman-scholar of modernist music, or Jonathan Goldman, corporate capital investor/manager/consultant?
You’ve come to the wrong place–though I feel some refracted, doppleganger-ish identification with the first two of those, not the third..
MORE UPDATES, Fall 2025
I recently published an article, “Zohran Mamdani, and a 100-year-old history of anti-Zionism in New York City” in Mondoweiss. Though the journal labels it an opinion piece, it is mostly a history of 1920s anti-Zionism in NYC’s Arabic-speaking and Jewish communities. Read it here.
I contributed an article titled “Including Frances Steloff” to Centripetal Joyce / Joyce Centrifugal, a gathering of selected papers from the International James Joyce Foundation symposium in Dublin 2022 marking the centenary of the publication of Ulysses. My chapter chronicles the impact on Joyce’s legacy by Steloff, founder of the Gotham Book Mart and the James Joyce Society. Find out more here.
In September 2021, I was honored to become President of the James Joyce Society (founded in New York City in 1947). My team and I work hard to program events that serve Joyce scholarship, connect Joyce’s works to general audiences, and promote an inclusive Joyce readerly community.
That’s all my day job, so to speak. In addition, I’m a musician: trumpet player, songwriter, and bandleader, and radio DJ as well. My main current band is a Latin soul/boogaloo outfit called Spanglish Fly.
I’ve also spent many hours of my life playing music in the service of social justice and progressive causes as member of the RMO (which see, if you know what I'm talking about).