The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: Margalit Fox on the Rise and Fall of an Organized Crime Boss in conversation with Debby Applegate

About this event

New York Stories is a new series of talks and live interviews exploring the lives of the artists, influencers, and powerbrokers who have shaped the political and cultural landscape of New York City. Through personal stories, pivotal moments, and the history of institutions they built, challenged, or transformed, the series examines how these figures influenced New York’s past and continue to define its future. Join acclaimed journalist Margalit Fox and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Debby Applegate for a riveting conversation about The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, Fox’s dazzling portrait of the Gilded Age’s most infamous criminal mastermind. Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum was a German-Jewish immigrant and visionary businesswoman who built a vast empire beneath the surface of respectable New York society. Blending true crime, social history, and biography, Fox’s epic depicts a vivid image of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers, and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and “legitimate” commerce. Through the unforgettable true story of Fredericka Mandelbaum, this conversation will explore ambition, reinvention, and the hidden systems of power that shape the modern city. Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in The New York Times’s celebrated Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public send-offs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of four previous books, The Confidence Men, Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and Talking Hands, Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson. Debby Applegate is a historian whose first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles…