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.
NEW BOOK
My new book, Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York from the Suppressed to the Strange (SUNY Press, 2026) is out! Email me for a discount code.
This book is a culmination of years of research about 1920s NYC, some of which you can find on the website New York 1920s: One Hundred Years Ago Today, When We Became Modern.
Updates, Fall 2026: Two new articles!
I am honored to have a piece in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts, called "A Black Coney Island, Cancelled," about Solomon Riley's attempt to build an amusement park for Black customers at a time when other facilities in NYC operated under Jim Crow practices. Elaborating on work I did for my book, it is also a personal piece; spurred by editor Kyla Kupferstein Torres, I combine historical narrative with autobiographical material about my privileged movement through NYC, and when that movement was stymied.
I also just published “Gatsby’s Other New York Islands: Incarceration, Segregation, Deadnaming,” in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. This article starts with The Great Gatsby ‘s mention of “Blackwell’s Island”—which, by the time of the novel’s events in 1922, had been renamed Welfare Island, and argues that the book participates in the erasure of systems of marginalization and suppression such as Jim Crow practices and carceral culture.
It is sheer coincidence that these two pieces with their related content should come out at the same time; one was submitted over a year before the other.