The Edith and Carl Marks Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, known as "the J", was incorporated in 1927 and has helped over one million Jews in the Bensonhurst section of New York City's borough of Brooklyn. It initially served as a community center for Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children. As the complexion of the Jewish community in Bensonhurst changed, its community center changed in accord. During the 1940s and 1950s, a large influx of Syrian Jews immigrated to the area. It was during this period that Sandy Koufax, the son of Syrian Jewish immigrants, played on the basketball courts of "the J".
In the 1980s, a third wave of immigrants, this time from the former Soviet Union, once again shifted the focus of the community center to that of a settlement house.
Former members include:
- Harvey Fierstein - Tony Award winning writer of Torch Song Trilogy and gay rights activist
- Gary David Goldberg - creator of television series such as Family Ties, Spin City and Brooklyn Bridge
- Sandy Koufax - Baseball Hall of Famer
Famous quotes containing the words edith, carl, marks, jewish, community and/or house:
“Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again;”
—Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)
“Oh no, it wasn’t the aviators, it was beauty that killed the beast.”
—James Creelman, screenwriter, Ruth Rose, screenwriter, Merian Cooper, and Ernest Schoedsack. Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong)
“In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Fortunately art is a community effort—a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“The house on the edge of the serious wood
Was aware, was aware
Of why he came there....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)