Beth Israel’s Nathan Perlman Place and its Place in History

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COMMENTARY

Mount Sinai Beth Israel (MSBI) has been at the forefront of many peoples’ minds recently, largely because of controversies surrounding the proposed closure of the flagship site of this historic hospital.¹ Yet MSBI—located at 16th St. and 1st Ave, across from Nathan D. Perlman Place—has been downsizing little by little for years, not only because of financial pressures and prodding by managed care companies, but also because innovative treatment approaches and less invasive procedures have decreased needs for lengthy hospital stays.² Greater use of home care—hospice care, for instance—moved some essential medical care outside of the once hallowed hospital walls. Even the much-maligned but often life-saving electroconvulsive therapy is mostly administered in outpatient clinics without overnight hospital stays. In psychiatry, clinic or office care in less restrictive settings is far preferred over inpatient admission whenever safe or practical. Partial hospitals, where patients attend daytime therapy sessions but return home nightly, evolved in response. In short, there are many reasons why hospital beds go empty, and why wards remain vacant, as happened here.

New York’s Beth Israel Hospital has a long history, having opened its doors in 1889.³ Beth Israel served the exploding eastern European Jewish immigrant population that arrived in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These Yiddish-speaking Jews contrasted with their more affluent and better-established German-speaking coreligionists who had emigrated from Western Europe earlier in the century and who occupied tonier sections of New York City. Such German Jews were nicknamed “yekkas” because of the long coats they wore in the “Old Country.” Those Jews sought treatment uptown, at Mount Sinai Hospital, which opened at a time when other hospitals refused to treat Jews, be they rich or poor, educated or illiterate.

Those downtown Yiddish-speaking Jews were fleeing pograms and poverty, and possible 20 to 30 years’ conscriptions into the Czar’s army. They sought safety and shelter in tenements that lined New York City’s Lower East Side. They lived in crowded conditions in cold-water flats, where tuberculosis was rampant and sanitary conditions to control other infections were limited, to say the least. They eked out a living by working long hours in sweatshops or sometimes by standing outside, shivering, hawking goods from open air pushcarts. Of course, they needed health care and a local hospital, especially since most local hospitals did not treat Jews. Over time, other immigrant populations migrated to the area and utilized the hospital’s expanding medical resources. Many immigrants from all around the world still work at Beth Israel.

Without dismissing the importance of Beth Israel to its surrounding communities, and without undermining its stature in the history of hospitals in general, I confess that it was the specific location of Beth Israel Medical Center, rather than the populations it served, that pushed it into my consciousness recently. To be precise, the name of a single little street that bounds the original Beth Israel compelled me to write this piece. Let me explain.

Quite recently, I was gifted with Michael Benson’s book, Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America (Citadel Press, 2022). In that riveting book, Benson chronicles the unlikely alliance forged between the late Judge Nathan D. Perlman—a prominent attorney and jurist who was also elected to US Congress—and the notorious but brilliant Meyer Lansky of Murder Inc infamy. This odd couple connected for the expressed purpose of fighting itinerant (and actual) Nazis in America. Often enough, they succeeded in upending Nazi meetings, rallies, and marches during Depression era, pre-World War II America.

The 2 men were introduced through an equally unlikely source: a prominent Reform rabbi. Neither the judge nor the rabbi condoned killing—and they each emphasized their objections to “icing” anyone—but they strived to upend the German American Bund which nurtured itinerant henchman for Hitler and sponsored summer camps where uniformed children saluted, Nazi-style. In the Midwest, the Jews’ greatest enemy was the equally anti-Semitic Silver Legion, which denounced America as the “Jewnited Nations,” as per Benson.⁴

Most readers probably heard of Meyer Lansky, the gangster, who was said to have been the brains behind organized crime, and the head of Murder Inc. Lansky was also reputed to be the man who ensured that much needed wartime supplies left Brooklyn’s mob-controlled docks, to make their way to the imperiled Promised Land. Some New Yorkers remember the short-lived but transgressively named “Lansky’s Lounge” that opened in the Delancy Street space once occupied by Ratner’s kosher vegetarian restaurant.

Perhaps scholars of American history knew of Judge Nathan Perlman’s much-touted role in repealing prohibition, but for me, “Nathan D. Perlman” was the namesake of an obtrusive one-way street that separates Beth Israel’s buildings from neighboring Stuyvesant Park. That little lane (which cannot properly be called a New York City street) always seemed to run the wrong way, whether one approached it from east or west, north or south. Worst of all, it caused my cab fare to spike sky high as the cab circled the park, trying to find the correct ingress to Beth Israel, where I treated patients or supervised psychiatry residents or made ward rounds—or simply listened to lectures or Grand Rounds in the hospital’s cavernous auditorium.

Who would have guessed that this tiny little lane honors an accomplished attorney who once cavorted with gangsters (at the instigation of a rabbi) and who orchestrated successful confrontations with the swastika-wearing, Hitler-hailing members of German American Bund—and who played a backstage part in the 1939 Madison Square “Garden Party” when a rally attended by 22,000 pro-Nazi members of the German-American Bund encountered 100,000 placard-carrying protesters, plus the outspoken journalist, Dorothy Thompson?⁵

Surely not I—until I read Michael Benson’s eye-opening true crime book, which was lauded by the Times of Israel upon its publication.⁶ Judge Perlman’s effective anti-Nazi activity was not revealed at the time. When Judge Perlman died in 1952, in Beth Israel Hospital, at the age of 62, his obituary noted that he had assisted US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, President Truman’s appointee as chief US prosecutor of Nazi war criminals. His name is not forgotten even if all of his accomplishments were not well-known until Benson’s book alerted us to these hidden facets of history. How much his anti-Nazi activity, covert or overt, contributed to his being immortalized on this New York City street remains a matter of speculation.

The upshot of Reich-sponsored horrors in Europe are well-known by now but reading about American successes in thwarting homegrown Nazis our shores, and not only at the 1939 “Garden Party,” was eye-opening. The so-called “Minutemen” and other less colorfully named anti-Nazi (or anti-Silver Shirt) brigades prevailed in New York, Newark, in major Midwestern cities, and even in Los Angeles, where Nazis tried (but failed) to infiltrate Hollywood, in hopes of deploying its famed film industry as yet another pro-Nazi propaganda machine.

According to the book’s author, the story of Jewish gangsters beating up American Nazis was largely forgotten because the Bund, Silver Front, and similar organizations were outlawed after America entered World War II in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Some prominent Bund leaders, such as Fritz Kuhn, were deported and faded from fame.

Perhaps someday, someone will make a major motion picture about these not-so-minor events in history. Perhaps someday, I will return to this historic hospital before it disappears—and if so, I promise not to curse the high cost of cabs while crossing Nathan Perlman Place.

Dr Packer is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, New York.

References

1. Robbins L. Beth Israel, a hospital that once took everyone, will take far fewer. New York Times. May 26, 2016. Accessed July 11, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/nyregion/a-manhattan-hospital-that-once-took-everyone-will-take-far-fewer.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

2. Santora M. Mt. Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan will close to rebuild smaller. New York Times. May 25, 2016. Accessed July 11, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/nyregion/mount-sinai-beth-israel-hospital-in-lower-manhattan-will-close-to-rebuild-smaller.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

3. Goldstein J. Mount Sinai seeks to close one of lower Manhattan’s last hospitals. New York Times. November 3, 2023. Accessed July 11, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/nyregion/mount-sinai-beth-israel-lower-manhattan-hospital.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

4. Benson M. Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America. Citadel Press; 2022.

5. American Nazism and Madison Square Garden. April 14, 2021. Accessed July 11, 2024. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/american-nazism-and-madison-square-garden

6. Ghert-Zand R. Bam! Kapow! When 1930s Jewish mobsters beat up Nazis in the streets of America. Times of Israel. June 18, 2022. Accessed July 11, 2024. https://www.timesofisrael.com/bam-kapow-when-1930s-jewish-mobsters-beat-up-nazis-in-the-streets-of-america/amp/