The Center for Jewish History Presents HAMILL AND HABERMAN-STORIES OF NEW YORK

Growing up in Brooklyn, legendary journalist Pete Hamill was an altar boy in church and helped out a rabbi on Saturdays in a nearby synagogue. "He tried to teach me Yiddish," Hamill remembers, "and I did my little part trying to explain to him that the Cincinnati Reds were not Socialists. They were a baseball team." The experience shaped a credo the renowned reporter and best-selling novelist lives and writes by. "New York City," Hamill says, "is the capital of people who are not like you. Absorb as much as you can."

In a career spanning six decades, Pete Hamill has absorbed his city, written its stories, and imagined still more in his eleven novels.

On September 8th at 3 pm at the Center for Jewish History, the celebrated storyteller sits down with another notable New Yorker and his former New York Postcolleague: Bronx native and acclaimed New York Times reporter Clyde Haberman. Both sons of immigrants, Hamill and Haberman will talk about the Irish and Jewish neighborhoods they came from, the immigrant experience then and now, the tabloid that launched their careers, and the ever-changing city that continues to inspire. Hamill & Haberman | Stories of New York is presented by the Center for Jewish History in partnership with the American Jewish Historical Society, the Irish American Writers & Artists, the Irish American Historical Society, and the Glucksman Ireland House.

Hamill & Haberman |Stories of New York is the premiere program of a new series, CJHTalks. A reception and book signing will follow the program.

A celebrated journalist, novelist, essayist, editor and educator, as well as a cartoonist and artist, Pete Hamill was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1935. The first of seven children of Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Hamill left school at 16 to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and completed his high school education while serving in the Navy. He studied painting and writing in college on the GI Bill and joined the New York Post as a reporter in 1960. His newspaper career spanned decades and included positions at the Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and New York Newsday. He was also editor of the Post, and editor-in-chief-of the New York Daily News and wrote longer pieces for New York Magazine, the New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and other periodicals. Hamill is also the author of many novels including Snow in August, about the unlikely friendship between a young Irish Catholic boy and an elderly Jewish rabbi in Brooklyn. He is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Columbia Journalism Award for Lifetime Achievement, the George Polk Career Award, and the Irish American Writers & Artists Eugene O'Neill Lifetime Achievement Award.

Clyde Haberman first worked at The New York Times as a copy boy in 1964, then as a campus correspondent at City College of New York. In 1966, he began reporting for the New York Post, ultimately returning to the Times in 1977 as an editor in the Week in Review section. He went on to become a Metro reporter, City Hall Bureau chief and, from 1982 to 1995, a foreign correspondent based successively in Tokyo, Rome and Jerusalem. Returning home, he wrote NYC, his twice-a-week column on New York, from 1995 to 2011. In 2009, he was part of a Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News, awarded for coverage of the prostitution scandal that led to Gov. Eliot Spitzer's resignation. Since 2014 he written a regular Times column accompanying Retro Report, a series of video documentaries exploring major news stories of the past and their continuing resonance. Haberman is the writer and editor of The Times of the Seventies: The Culture, Politics, and Personalities That Shaped the Decade, published in 2013 by Black Dog & Leventhal. In 2015, among other journalistic honors, he was inducted into the New York Press Club's Hall of Fame.

Tickets: $20 general; $15 seniors; $12 CJH/Partner members, students

Illuminating history, culture, and heritage, the Center for Jewish History in New York City provides a collaborative home for five partner organizations: the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The partners' archives comprise the world's largest and most comprehensive archive of the modern Jewish experience outside of Israel. The collections span a thousand years, with more than 5 miles of archival documents (in dozens of languages and alphabet systems), more than 500,000 volumes, as well as thousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings, films, and photographs. The Center for Jewish History is also home to the Lillian Goldman Reading Room, Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute, the David Berg Rare Book Room and the Collection Management & Conservation Wing. Our public programs create opportunities for diverse audiences to explore the rich historical and cultural material that lives within the Center's walls. The Center is a Smithsonian Affiliate, and is a partner of the Google Cultural Institute.

The American Jewish Historical Society is the oldest national ethnic historical organization in the United States. It provides access to more than 20 million documents and 50,000 books, art and artifacts that reflect the history of the Jewish presence in the United States from 1654 to the present. Among its treasures are the first American book published in Hebrew, and the handwritten original of Emma Lazarus's The New Colossus, which is the poem that graces the Statue of Liberty.

The American Irish Historical Society was founded in Boston in 1897 by fifty American Irishmen, including Theodore Roosevelt, who, with the motto "That The World May Know," dedicated themselves to telling the true story of the Irish in America. Founded to inform the world of the achievements of the Irish in America, today the Society is a national center of scholarship and public education. From its home on New York's Museum Mile, the Society serves as a focal point of the contemporary transatlantic Irish experience, a place where current public issues are explored, and where the great renaissance of Irish culture is celebrated in lectures, concerts, art & design exhibitions. Non-partisan and non-sectarian from its inception, the Society welcomes new members and is pleased to make its library and select events open to the public.

Located in the heart of New York's Greenwich Village, Glucksman Ireland House NYU is the center for Irish and Irish-American Studies at New York University, with courses in history, Irish language, literature, music, and politics. For the New York community, the center presents a weekly public events series during the academic year, as well as a monthly traditional Irish music series. Serving as a resource center for Irish, Irish-American, and Irish diasporic culture, their mission is to foster excellence in the study of Ireland, Irish America and the Irish Diaspora in New York and the global communities.

Created in 2008, Irish American Writers & Artists celebrate the achievements of Irish American writers and artists, past and present and highlight, energize and encourage Irish Americans active in the arts. Presenting salons, book launches, theater events, and conversations, IAW&A has been recognized by Irish American organizations as an important contributor to New York City's Irish American arts scene. The organization presents the annual Eugene O'Neill Lifetime Achievement Award to an individual for an exemplary contribution to the arts, an honor Pete Hamill received in 2014.

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