[1] The story follows a young Jewish immigrant woman living in New York City who wishes to marry a wealthy Protestant and escape the confines of her lower-class upbringing.

[5] The protagonist, Sonya Vrunsky, is the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the squalor of New York's Lower East Side.

In a case of "opposites attract", she uses her ethnic background as a Russian Jew to portray herself as exotic and exciting which ends up being, as she had hoped, appealing to the cool, reserved John.

In the Introduction to the 1995 reissue of Salome of the Tenements, Gay Wilentz writes:Sonya gets her man, but she finds that the gulf between them is unbridgeable and that the manner in which she must behave to be with him denies her very being.

[7] In contrast, the historian James Harvey Robinson praised Salome of the Tenements for exposing John Manning as a hypocritical moralizer with his "facile, pompous generalizations and academic abstractions".