Starting in 1906, the Forward launched “A Bintel Brief,” a Yiddish-language advice column which documented the trials and tribulations of adapting to life in America. More than a century later, our friends at the Tenement Museum have picked up the torch — with a few modern touches. The Jewish Daily Forward, the most widely read…
If you’re an American Jew, there’s a pretty good chance that somewhere, somehow, someone in your family made dinner on the Lower East Side. Though the area has been home to a countless nationalities and ethnic groups, it holds a special place in the hearts of American Jews, many of whom can trace their first…
Oh, to live in a teeming tenement! That’s not a sentiment you hear a lot these days. In fact, it’s doubtful that the great wave of Jews immigrating to New York at the turn of the last century would have uttered it, either. But to the tenements they came, and New York has never been…
Street photographer Rebecca Lepkoff moves so fast that even those half her age can barely match her pace. One day the exuberant 96-year-old is shooting Latino storefronts in her Harlem neighborhood, the next she’s snapping her beloved Essex Street on the Lower East Side. In May, she boated up the Seine to Paris, where she…
The investigative news site ProPublica hosted a session Monday on women in the newsroom at the Tenement Museum, a Lower East Side institution dedicated to telling the story of immigrant life in New York. Unfortunately, the venue wasn’t the only thing that felt retro about the event. The topics covered — the dearth of women…
The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set On A Thousand Square Feet of The Lower East Side By Katharine Greider Public Affairs, 352 pages, $27 By the beginning of the 20th century, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, more densely populated than Calcutta. At the Tenement Museum on…
Borscht? Kugel? Pastrami? What exactly did our ancestors eat when they first immigrated to the United States? This was the question on the table for discussion at a recent “Beard on Books” evening at the Tenement Museum. Jane Ziegelman, author of “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement,”…
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