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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The Schmooze Hipsters and History on the Lower East Side
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Traipsing around the Lower East Side on a beastly hot summer day, I had lots of company. The streets were filled with tourists, shoppers and the cool cats who now call that downtown neighborhood their home. Most visitors, I suspect, were in search of the fabled hipster haven that…
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Food A Virtual Taste of the Lower East Side
“Take a big deep breath, smell that pickle-ness, because 100 years ago this is what the Lower East Side would have smelled like,” Sarah Lohman, of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum said recently. Lohman was leading the museum’s newest walking tour “The Taste of the Lower East Side.” Tour-goers learned about the various cuisines…
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Food Future of Legendary Essex Street Market Uncertain
A gastronomic fixture of the Lower East Side for seventy-one years, the Essex Street Market faces a precarious future. Recently approved guidelines for the nearby Seward Park Urban Renewal Area development project include the possibility of demolishing the current market in favor of a larger, more modernized facility at a new, still undetermined, location. In…
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Food Schav Returns to Greenmarkets This Spring
One sure sign of spring in my Brooklyn neighborhood is the first sighting of the Mr. Softee truck. A hundred years ago, Jewish residents of the Lower East Side knew it was spring by the appearance of sorrel, or schav in Yiddish, on the neighborhood pushcarts. While the pushcarts are gone, nowadays you can find…
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The Schmooze Orthodox Neighbors Angry Over Pornographic Exhibit on Lower East Side
While adolescent yeshiva students may not share their dissatisfaction, Orthodox Jewish neighbors of a Lower East Side art gallery have issued a chorus of complaints over a current exhibition involving pornographic images According to the New York Post, the Allegra LaViola Gallery’s new “Pornucopia” show “features a slew of sexy nude images of men and…
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The Schmooze Getting to the Bottom of Show Business
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Much has been written of late about the ways in which celebrated American musicals such as “Oklahoma” or “South Pacific” carry considerable Jewish freight. While most audiences come away humming rather than thinking, the American musical, many scholars suggest, is actually where American Jewish playwrights, lyricists, choreographers and designers…
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Food Jews and Chinese Food: A Christmas Story
Chinese food is the most prolific cuisine on the planet, and, aside from the Chinese themselves, no one loves it more than American Jews, according to Andrew Coe, author of “Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States.” On Christmas, noodle, rice and savory dish consumption quite possibly peaks among Jews,…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Jews of the Fillmore
With the opening of San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay’s (JCHS) new building on Ellis Street in 2002, the city’s organized Jewish community finally returned to the Fillmore. Only local Jewish history buffs appreciated the significance; the neighborhood in which the school is situated — now called The Western Addition — was…
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