This is the Forward’s coverage of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in Manhattan that was a center of Jewish immigrant culture in the 20th century.
Lower East Side
The Latest
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Food Streit’s Matzo Factory to Close
Streit’s Matzo The Streit family announced today that it will close the doors of its 90-year-old factory this spring, at the conclusion of the Passover baking season. The announcement was made by filmmaker Michael Levine, who had been working on a documentary about the company, Streit’s Matzo and the American Dream, for the past two…
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Opinion The Back-to-the-Future Bagel
Noted food writer and bagel connoisseur Mimi Sheraton once wrote in The New York Times longingly about proper, old-fashioned New York bagels — small, dense beings with the perfect chew to their center and snap to their crust: “I remember them well…. Their like will not come this way again.” Three years later, bagels are…
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Opinion I’m Jewish and Greek. Who Do I Root for On Hanukkah?
Youth from Ioannina’s Greek community in traditional dress / Haaretz They’ve switched on the window displays on Fifth Avenue, and the trees are for sale on the street corners, so I know I’m about to get asked the question: Do I miss Christmas? It’s a common question for a convert. But, despite a childhood full…
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Culture Houdini, My Father and Me
My father, a New York psychoanalyst, wrote about the sons of passive or absent fathers. (There was doubtless a reason why they interested him.) Among his many elegant papers and monographs, covering such (seemingly) disparate characters as Bishop James Pike and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, are two published full-length biographies, one of Joseph Conrad (whose father…
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Fast Forward Photographer Who Documented Jewish Lower East Side, Dies at 98
Rebecca Lepkoff, a photographer who documented Jewish life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has died. Lepkoff, who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood there, died Sunday at 98. Her series of photographs showing the Lower East Side was taken in the 1940s and 1950s. Lepkoff lived a portion of the year in Vermont,…
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Food Nouveau Jewish Food Hits Streets of Manhattan
Workmen’s Circle poster advertising the Taste of Jewish Culture street fair // Facebook New York’s got so many hip new delis that it may be as easy to find gefilte fish and borscht as it was in 1892, when The Workmen’s Circle held its first meeting on the Lower East Side. So it’s no small…
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Food The Lower East Side Is Now Kosher-Less
Update: June 12th: It would appear that the close of Shalom Chai was temporary. And while the owner owes thousands to the landlord, the pizza shop is in fact open. More details coming soon. It’s over: The last kosher restaurant on the Lower East Side is gone. As if to highlight kosher’s tragic state downtown,…
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Opinion Shelly Silver’s Evil ‘Twin’
(JTA) — Evil twins make frequent appearances in the cheesier sorts of movies and television shows, yet tend to be less common in state politics. But not according New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Silver has never lacked for chutzpah, but he appears to have taken it to Olympian heights with his most recent…
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