The Cleveland Jewish Book Festival is back for its 25th year! Join Margalit Fox to discuss her book, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum.

In 1850, Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth? In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence – a receiver of stolen goods – and a criminal mastermind. Combining deep historical research with a narrative flair, Fox tells the unforgettable true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies America’s cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.

Margalit Fox is considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism. Fox retired in June 2018 from a 24-year-career at the New York Times, where she was most recently a senior writer. As a member of the newspaper’s celebrated obituary news department, she has written the Page One sendoffs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, Originally trained as a cellist, Ms. Fox holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics from Stony Brook University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of four previous books.

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This event is part of the Cleveland Jewish Book Festival, supported in part by an Ohio Humanities Ignite Grant!

Curious about other grants? Visit our calendar or browse our list of grantees!