1989. Brooklyn, the Queens and the boroughs of New York are an urban jungle at the hands of the gangs who coke and crack the traders of Wall Street. How can we survive in these ghettos when we are young, decadent, Jewish and white? Dealing with drugs, stealing cars, looting the Ralph Lauren department in the temples of Manhattan luxury, making rap gore. The choice is wide. Or limited. Everything, rather than die before death.

It is in this great whole that Karim Madani embarks us. This journalist , a specialist in urban cultures, conducted a survey of several years in these "no go zones", where the life expectancy of young desperados is shortened with dope and .22.

Founding a gang of girls, it took me just an hour

He succeeded in winning the trust of four of these young hard-core Jews, including a daughter of a gang leader , who gave him a chronicle of a destiny cut off by violence , drugs and poverty. Their names: Jewish Jane, Ill Bill, Necro, and Ethan Horowitz. Survivors, who say leprosy of ruined bars, bullet wounds, poetry of fear, humor in the face of probable death, stays in prison.

Such confidences to a journalist, French in addition, are rare. As written with a sound of the case, the words of these four lives resonate over the pages, melody of a contemporary urban tragedy that had never been told. "Founding a gang of girls, it took me just an hour (...). There's no shit, man is a wolf for the man and it will never change," cowardly Jewish Jane.

There is no shit, man is a wolf for man

"Jewish Gangsta" is a non-fiction but reads like a novel. The energy that comes from it has the tension of a rap bat. Calming its steps on those of David Simon and Ed Burns (authors of "The corner   ", Ed. I read, birth certificate of the series "The wire   "), Karim Madani proves once again that reality goes beyond fiction. This nugget is a literary Red Bull.

"Jewish Gangsta", the origins of the goon movement, Karim Madani, ed. Marchialy, 18 €.

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