Speaker: Ron Arons

Nationally known scholar Ron Arons tells the true story of Jewish gangsters and other shady characters who served time “up the [ Hudson] River” and the New York Jewish community’s response. And you thought Jews didn’t commit crimes! Or you thought the number of Jews who broke the law was small. Think again. Ron Arons has spent much of the past decade researching Jewish criminals – big name gangsters and lesser-known individuals. His groundbreaking research of Jews who served in the famous prison (a.k.a. the “Big House”) “up the [ Hudson] River” both quantifies the problem and uncovers details about many gangsters never reported before. The culmination of Ron’s work is a book by the same title published this year.   In this lecture, he will explain how he took the “genealogical approach” to research, collecting a variety of original source documents – FBI files, court transcripts, vital records, census information, and prison admission records. The process also allowed Arons to explore many of these criminals’ childhoods to try to understand why these characters went to the other side of the tracks.

Ron Arons has given presentations at six of the past seven IAJGS conferences and to local genealogical societies across the country. His expertise is in researching the lives of criminals, mostly Jewish ones, but others as well. Ron won a Hackman Research Grant from the New York State Archives in 2005. Ron earned a B.S. in Engineering from Princeton and an MBA from the University of Chicago.