Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Alice in Shandehland: Scandal and Scorn in the Edelson/Horwitz Murder Case

Alice in Shandehland: Scandal and Scorn in the Edelson/Horwitz Murder Case

Halpern, Monda

Hardcover

Series: McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History, Book 2

JudaismGeneral Gender StudiesTrue Crime

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 077354559X
ISBN13: 9780773545595
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Jun 15 2015
Pages: 308
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

By 1931, Ben and Alice Edelson had been married for two decades and had seven children, but for years Alice had been having an affair with the married Jack Horwitz. On the night of 24 November, Ben, Alice, and Jack met at Edelson Jewellers to settle the thing. Words flew, a brawl erupted, and Jack was shot and killed. The tragedy marked the start of a sensational legal case that captured Ottawa headlines, with the prominent jeweller facing the gallows.

Through a detailed examination of newspaper coverage, interviews with family and community members, and evocative archival photographs, Monda Halpern's Alice in Shandehland reconstructs a long-silenced murder case in Depression-era Canada. Halpern contends that despite his crime, Ben Edelson was the object of far less contempt than his adulterous wife whose shandeh - Yiddish for shame or disgrace - seemed indefensible. While Alice endured the censure of both the Jewish community and the courtroom, Ben's middle-class respectability and the betrayal he suffered earned him favoured standing and, ultimately, legal exoneration.

Revealing the tensions around ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class, Alice in Shandehland explores the divergent reputations of Ben and Alice Edelson within a growing but insular and tenuous Jewish community, and within a dominant culture that embraced male success and valour during the emasculating 1930s.

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