Leo Hershkowitz

Leo Hershkowitz (November 21, 1924 – August 10, 2017) was an American historian of New York City who taught at Queens College for more than fifty years. He was a leading authority on the history of New York's colonial Jewish community and was known for rescuing large quantities of historical court and government records that were about to be destroyed.

Early life and education

Hershkowitz was born in the Bronx on November 21, 1924. He served in the United States Army in Hawaii and then attended Hunter College on the G.I. Bill. He received a master's degree from Columbia University and a PhD from New York University.

Career

Hershkowitz began teaching at Queens College in 1960 and retired in 2012; he also taught at New York University. His research centered on the social, political and legal history of early New York and on the city's Jewish community from its origins to the era before the mass immigration of the late 19th century. He insisted on working from original archival documents rather than indexes, abstracts or secondary accounts.

His book Tweed's New York: Another Look (1977) challenged the traditional picture of William M. Tweed shaped by Thomas Nast's cartoons and the New York Times{{'s}} attacks, examining the city's politics from the 1830s to 1870. In early American Jewish history, he edited Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704–1799 (1967) and, with Isidore S. Meyer, Letters of the Franks Family, 1733–1748 (1968), an edition of the letters of Abigail Franks later re-edited by Edith B. Gelles. He also wrote entries on colonial American Jews for the Encyclopaedia Judaica.

Rescue of historical records

Hershkowitz became known for saving historical documents that government offices were about to discard, at times retrieving them from dumpsters or shortly before they were shredded. Records he rescued were held for a time at Queens College and later distributed to other institutions.

Collections bearing his name are held by New York University's Tamiment Library and by the American Jewish Historical Society, which received from him a series of New York court records from 1835 to 1912.

Other activities

He was the first member of the education and history committee of the Foundation for Historic New Amsterdam, later renamed the Tolerance Park Foundation.

Death

Hershkowitz died in Boston on August 10, 2017.

Selected works

• Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704–1799. New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1967.
• (with Isidore S. Meyer, eds.) Letters of the Franks Family (1733–1748). Waltham, Mass.: American Jewish Historical Society, 1968.
• Tweed's New York: Another Look. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977.