More in ‘Katharine Weber’

When Moishe Cohen opened Economy Candy on Essex Street on the Lower Side of Manhattan in 1937, Depression era customers chose their favorite treats from barrels of nuts, bins of dried fruits, blocks of halvah, and sweets, from chocolate to rock candy. Today’s patrons, in the throes of a deep recession, still flock to the store, now a block away from its original location, in search of discounted candy. But Economy, run today by Moishe’s son and grandson, is not the only longstanding example of Jews in the confection trade.

In 1979, a filmmaker named Laurel Vlock started the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, a small project that eventually evolved into the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies—4,300 videotaped interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, housed in Yale’s Sterling Library. (Steven Spielberg’s similar Shoah Foundation was founded much more recently, in 1994, after he ...