Patricia Volk's delicious, charming, and wildly funny memoir lets us into her big, crazy, loving, cheerful, infuriating, and wonderful family, where you're never just hungry—you're starving to death, and you're never just full—you're stuffed.

Volk's family fed New York City for one hundred years, from 1888 when her great-grandfather introduced pastrami to America until 1988, when her father closed his garment center restaurant.

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In this extraordinarily intimate film, seven years in the making, we are taken into the depths of the Hasidim's joyous, sometimes harsh, and often beautiful world. With their use of the Yiddish language, their distinctive clothes and their strict observance to Jewish ritual and law, the Hasidim are considered by many an insular people with little connection to mainstream America. And yet their values are those that many Americans find most precious:...

"The Jewish Metropolis: New York from the 17th to the 21st Century covers the entire sweep of the history of the largest Jewish community of all time. It provides an introduction to many facets of that history, including the ways in which waves of immigration shaped New York's Jewish community; Jewish cultural production in English, Yiddish, Ladino, and German; New York's contribution to the development of American Judaism; Jewish interaction with...