Welcome to 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
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News Judy Rapfogel Is Woman in the Middle of Two N.Y. Scandals
One September night in 1997, Judy Rapfogel threw a party. Press reports had just declared her the winner in a tight Democratic primary race to represent Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the New York City Council, effectively making the seat hers in the heavily Democratic town. Her boss, the new State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver,…
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Food Yonah Schimmel Knishery Staying Put
Alex Wolfman, a descendant of Yonah Schimmel, the knishery’s original owner. Flickr. After reporting earlier this week on rumors that 115-year-old Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery might be losing its lease, the Forward received an email today setting the record straight. In a follow-up phone call, the Forward spoke with Ellen Anistratov, daughter of Alex Wolfman,…
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Food Is Yonah Schimmel Knishery Closing?
Photograph by Shawn Hote/Flickr. I don’t deal in rumors, but I also can’t ignore the deafening chatter. Bowery Boogie, a terrific blog about New York’s Lower East Side, has reported that 115-year-old East Houston eatery, Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery, may be about to lose its lease. “Apparently word on the street is that the landlord…
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Opinion Why We Mourn the Loss of Streit’s Matzo
A worker at Streit’s Matzo Factory on the Lower East Side / Getty Images This week brought news of the closing of Streit’s Matzo Factory on the Lower East Side, a landmark that has been there since 1925. For the past fifteen years, on the Sunday before Passover, on behalf of the Museum at Eldridge…
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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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