This is an excerpt from the introduction to An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York's Irish and Italians, a book by former Newsday reporter Paul Moses that is to be released July 7 by NYU Press. On those chilly March days when I walked home with the other boys from Mary Queen of Heaven School in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn in the mid-1960s, someone would occasionally shout, "Rumble!"

This shout would go out in March because it was the month of Saint Patrick's Day, and his sainthood naturally needed to be celebrated with a street fight between the Irish kids and the Italian kids. I cast my lot with the Italian kids, for my ancestry is Italian on my mother's side of the family. There was no percentage, in choosing sides for a scuffle among Catholic schoolboys, in acknowledging that two of my grandparents were Jewish.

Read more

Source: http://www.newsday.com/